Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Your line is an unlettered one.
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I wrote a long response to your earlier post and the site just ate it, and I'm not writing it again. I wasn't particularly upset by Cotton's op-ed, and am not sure why you seem to think otherwise. It was poorly written, as you agree, and would have been beneath the NYT's standards, if those standards apply to right-wing views. Obviously, they don't -- the NYT chased Cotton to write it, and let him write crap. If editorial standards had applied, they wouldn't have run it, and people were more upset, I think, that the NYT gave it their imprimatur than about Cotton's views themselves, which you can find on Breitbart, Fox, and a variety of other sources. (Hence the absurdity of the idea of denying Cotton a platform. Cotton has no shortage of platforms.) The harder question is, in this day and age, what should the NYT do with its op-ed pages. Your glib answer is, expose readers to all views, the assumption being that the readers skew left and need to be confronted with what the right is saying. (I would take that more seriously if you had any interest in finding a way to make sure that people on the right are exposed to what the left is saying.) That's great if you can find people on the right who write good op-eds. But you don't, because the premise of a good op-ed is open debate, and today's conservatives are not interested in open debate. Given the chance, Cotton repeated lies about antifa. How do you have a debate with people who are so committed to lies?
You are committed to both-sidesism, so when you are confronted with the fact that Trump and conservatives lie all the time, you pretend that the left does it too, and you insist that reporting that Trump lies is itself a sign of media bias. You care more about the form of the debate than the substance.
The best thing I have read on this subject is this piece (in Vox!) by David Roberts. He makes a lot of good points. Please don't feel any need to read it or respond to it.
