Glenn Greenwald bitch slaps the New York Times.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES GUILD, the union of employees of the Paper of Record, tweeted a condemnation on Sunday of one of their own colleagues, op-ed columnist Bret Stephens. Their denunciation was marred by humiliating typos and even more so by creepy and authoritarian censorship demands and petulant appeals to management for enforcement of company “rules” against other journalists. To say that this is bizarre behavior from a union of journalists, of all people, is to woefully understate the case.

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Without weighing in on the merits of Stephens’ critiques, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not, it is hardly debatable that his discussing this vibrant multi-pronged debate is squarely within his function as a political op-ed writer at a national newspaper. Stephens himself explained that he took the unusual step of critiquing his own employer’s work because “the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover,” contending that avoiding writing about it out of collegial deference “is to be derelict in our responsibility” to participate in society’s significant disputes.

BUT HIS COLLEAGUES in the New York Times Guild evidently do not believe that he had any right to express his views on these debates. Indeed, they are indignant that he did so. In a barely-literate tweet that not once but twice misspelled the word “its” as “it’s” — not a trivial level of ignorance for writers with the world’s most influential newspaper — the union denounced Stephens and the paper itself on these grounds:


It is a short tweet, as tweets go, but they impressively managed to pack it with multiple ironies, fallacies, and decrees typical of the petty tyrant. Above all else, this statement, and the mentality it reflects, is profoundly unjournalistic.

To start with, this is a case of journalists using their union not to demand greater editorial freedom or journalistic independence — something one would reasonably expect from a journalists’ union — but demanding its opposite: that writers at the New York Times be prohibited by management from expressing their views and perspectives about the controversies surrounding the 1619 Project. In other words: they are demanding that their own journalistic colleagues be silenced and censored. What kind of journalists plead with management for greater restrictions on journalistic expression rather than fewer?

Apparently, the answer is New York Times journalists. Indeed, this is not the first time they have publicly implored corporate management to restrict the freedom of expression and editorial freedom of their journalistic colleagues. At the end of July, the Guild issued a series of demands, one of which was that “sensitivity reads should happen at the beginning of the publication process, with compensation for those who do them.”

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As creepy as “sensitivity readers” are for fiction writing and other publishing fields, it is indescribably toxic for journalism, which necessarily questions or pokes at rather than bows to the most cherished, sacred pieties. For it to be worthwhile, it must publish material — reporting and opinion pieces — that might be “potentially objectionable” to all sorts of powerful factions, including culturally hegemonic liberals.

But this is a function which the New York Times Union wants not merely to avoid fulfilling themselves but, far worse, to deny their fellow journalists. They crave a whole new layer of editorial hoop-jumping in order to get published, a cumbersome, repressive new protocol for drawing even more constraining lines around what can and cannot be said beyond the restrictions already imposed by the standard orthodoxies of the Times and their tone-flattening editorial restrictions.

When journalists exploit their unions not to demand better pay, improved benefits, enhanced job security or greater journalistic independence but instead as an instrument for censoring their own journalistic colleagues, then the concept of unions — and journalism — is wildly perverted.

Then there is the tattletale petulance embedded in the Union’s complaint. In demanding enforcement of workplace “rules” by management against a fellow journalist — they do not specify which sacred “rule” Stephens allegedly violated — these union members sound more like Human Resources Assistant Managers or workplace informants than they do intrepid journalists. Since when do unions of any kind, but especially unions of journalists, unite to complain that corporate managers and their editorial bosses have been too lax in the enforcement of rules governing what their underlings can and cannot say?

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If you are eager to constrict the boundaries of expression, why would you choose journalism of all lines of work? It’d be like someone who believes space travel to be an immoral waste of resources opting to become an astronaut for NASA.

Perhaps these tawdry episodes should be unsurprising. After all, one major reason that social media companies — which never wanted the obligation to censor but instead sought to be content-neutral platforms for the transmission of communications in the mold of AT&T — turned into active speech regulators was because the public, often led by journalists, began demanding that they censor more. Some journalists even devote significant chunks of their career to publicly complaining that Facebook and Twitter are failing to enforce their “rules” by not censoring robustly enough.

A belief in the virtues of free expression was once a cornerstone of the journalistic spirit. Guilds and unions fought against editorial control, not demanded greater amounts be imposed by management. They defended colleagues when they were accused by editorial or corporate bosses of “rules” violations, not publicly tattled and invited, even advocated for, workplace disciplinary measures.

But a belief in free expression is being rapidly eclipsed in many societal sectors by a belief in the virtues of top-down managerial censorship, silencing and enhanced workplace punishment for thought and speech transgressions. As this imperious but whiny New York Times Guild condemnation reflects, this trend can be seen most vividly, and most destructively, in mainstream American journalism. Nothing guts the core function of journalism more than this mindset.

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