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I don't understand what Graham means when he says the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened.
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I think he means that the customary approach to free speech was to protect the rights of any group to speak, however fucked up what they say might be. ACLU defending Nazis in Skokie, etc.
The old rule was bad ideas would be countered by either being ignored or critiqued with other speech showing their flaws.
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To me, the more salient change lately is the proliferation of ways for individuals to be published and heard, particularly in social media. The most recent example is Substack. This totally cuts against what Graham is saying. Niche voices can find their own audience without needing to worry about gatekeepers.
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I think he's focusing initially on college campus intolerance and corporate toadying to left wing cancel mobs and extrapolating from there.
However, as to your point, I agree that Substack and other forms of direct online publishing have allowed more voices to proliferate. But Substack is a bit unique. It attracts voices who, to use Sam Harris's term, have cancel-proofed themselves. Taibbi, Sullivan, Greenwald, Harris... these people are beyond the reach of cancel hysterias. They actually profit from looking down their noses at those who'd seek to cancel them. Substack is like a finger in the eye of the current youth gestalt: An offending voice should not be countered, but silenced as much as possible, and have economic pain inflicted on it.
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If you ask me, the bigger threat to the marketplace of ideas is the proliferation of people arguing in bad faith, and the channels dedicated to telling people whatever they want to hear. A huge proportion of Republicans think Biden stole the election.
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That is a huge problem. It forces consumers of media to apply critical thinking and decide what's true and what's not. And worse, it allows intentionally self-deluding types ample falsehoods to pass back and forth to one another to silo themselves even more extremely.
However, the more the intolerant left seeks to purge the slightest offending voices from mainstream media, the more mainstream media becomes garbage. Garbage like what CNN has turned into -- ignoring riots in the streets in the summer, and treating the Capitol riot like the most important story of our lifetime. (It's not.) Or garbage like the argument, offered by numerous mainstream left-leaning sources, that rioting in the streets this summer did not spread Covid. (It did.) That kind of Fox-like "finger on the scale" reporting drives consumers away from mainstream media (no one trusts it anymore) and into the arms of the bad faith outlets of alternative media.
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If you were to take the complaints of minority journalists seriously -- I know, but just imagine with me -- then it's a real problem that their voices are underrepresented. Their stories are not being told or heard. That is a problem for free inquiry. I could try to translate that into terms you'd be more sympathetic to by saying that many voices seek to conform to what the (white) majority is saying, and that dissenting voices get squelched, or just not hired.
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You're speaking of the McNeil debacle, I assume. The voices of the co-workers who demanded his firing were not all minority. The most lurid and embarrassing reaches of these moral panics are made by white people who are caught up in purity tests. They treat "social justice" (which they define differently to suit whatever their current aim is) as a religion. Meanwhile, minority voices remain underrepresented. But the white clerisy of this new social justice religion gets its blood lust satisfied by economically harming McNeil.
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eta: Also, it's like there needs to be one conversation about the New York Times, and another conversation about the rest of the media. The New York Times is doing fine as a business and hires whoever it wants. It has an outsized importance right now because of the proliferation of other voices and because it has no competitor in setting the national conversation.
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You think so? I think WaPo is a very close second right now. But as they both have roughly the same exact slants, they might as well be Diet Coke and Coke Zero. Might as well consider them a single product.
