More Times "Fairness"

Saw this on Powerline concerning the Joseph Berger column I wrote about a couple days ago: Evan Almighty

In "Film portrays stifling of speech, but one college's struggle reflects a nuanced reality," the New York Times begins with a look at Evan Coyne Maloney's documentary film "Indoctrinate U." Maloney's film portrays the suffocating intolerance of heterodox speech in the name of diversity and sensitivity on college campuses. You know we're in trouble when the Times's critique finds the film wanting in "nuance," but in "New York Times covers Indoctrinate U," Evan capably responds. Evan writes:

Oddly, one of the examples cited in the article (but not the film) was the case of a student paper published by Vassar's Moderate, Independent and Conservative Student Alliance. The paper was de-funded and shut down for a year after publishing a piece criticizing the school's funding of special "social centers" for minority and gay students. But because the paper was eventually allowed to start publishing again-the following year-the Vassar case is presented as one in which "[u]ltimately, free speech was respected."

Sorry, but shutting down a paper for a year is not a benign event, and it is certainly not one in which we can say "free speech was respected." If Homeland Security shut down the Times for a year after exposing ways that we track terrorist financing, I'm sure they'd understand my position on this.

Evan also finds the Times's critique itself to be wanting in attention to "nuance" in its description of one of the cases he covers in the film:

When the author [of the Times article] does cite cases mentioned in the film, he minimizes them by leaving out the most vital information. One student, he says, "underwent a daylong disciplinary hearing for posting a flier." Actually, that student had the police called on him and spent 18 months of his life defending himself when the school's demanded that he see a psychologist and threatened him with expulsion. His crime? Posting this flyer which promoted an upcoming speech by an author named Mason Weaver. It merely had a picture of him, the title of his book, and the date, time and location of the event. Yet university regarded it as "offensive literature of a racial nature," which ultimately led to a federal court case.

That's a tad more than "a daylong disciplinary hearing." But the author ignored all that.

Somehow the Times's attention to "nuance" ends when nuances support the filmmaker's case.

Amen.