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Originally Posted by PeteMoss
I just don't understand why this is the new cause celebre. It has happened a few times and I'm sure it sucks, but for the most part it just seems like people don't want to be told their opinions are bad. This writer wasn't fired. She quit.
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You keep focusing on the writer. She isn't the story. Nothing particularly bad happened to her, outside of having to experience some workplace bullying.
If you see no problem with an internal culture within news organizations that systematically eliminates dissent, treats disagreement with a very narrow conception of what is moral and right for society as intolerable and literally dangerous to other peoples' safety, and the transformation from a battleground of ideas into what was aptly described as an ideological warm bath for the people the Times imagines its readers to be, I'm not sure how else to explain it to you.
This quote from the letter says more or less everything:
Quote:
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Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
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These people are not journalists. They are preachers. And because the larger news corporations have systematically gobbled up local newspapers and news stations, there is an even smaller array of voices that the average person can hear now than there ever has been. But don't worry, as mentioned above, you can just pick the one that serves as an ideological warm bath for the sorts of people who believe what you also believe, and never have to think critically about anything. Apparently, we've reached a point where the outlets have decided that that's actually what they're
supposed to be providing.