As free speech dies

Sheryll Attkisson: The New Woke Times

The latest developments remove any lingering doubt as to how the Times sees its modern mission: serving and pleasing the left-wing activists on its staff and the liberal activists who dominate on the news and social media. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger’s dictum when he fired the newspaper’s public editor in May 2017 had come to pass in a terrible way. Recall that, at the time, he declared that the Times’ followers on social media would “collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be.”

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Make no mistake: other media outlets are taking note. In this way, they are motivated to self-censor news and information, lest they draw the wrath of the mobs. One editorial figure at a major international publication who did not want to be identified recounted numerous pieces he has recently killed for fear of the organized backlash.

“They can bankrupt me,” he tells me. “Facebook, Twitter, Google— they can ruin you in a matter of hours. For somebody like us, they can destroy you. So what do we do? We pull our punches. To raise certain issues is to cut your own throat.” He continues, “The newsman in me says, ‘Tell the truth,’ and that sounds great. But if I do that and destroy [my publication] in the process, what kind of pyrrhic victory is that?”

The information landscape becomes ever narrower, squashing diversity of thought and facts. Pretty soon, we won’t know what we don’t know. And that will be that.

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