“NYT’s Campus Free Speech Coverage Focuses 7-to-1 on Plight of Right”

“The New York Times did sporadically cover the dozens of laws throughout the country seeking to criminalize BDS, but never put it in the broader context of college free speech. (For example, musician Roger Waters’ “Congress Shouldn’t Silence Human Rights Advocates”—9/7/17—criticized laws that target “individuals and businesses who actively participate in boycott campaigns in support of Palestinian rights,” not specifically student activists.) A  piece defending BDS speech rights by anti-BDS CUNY professor Eric Alterman did run in March 2016, outside the timeframe of the study.

Professors silenced or fired over anti-Israel activities, like Berkeley’s Paul Hadweh or SUNY Plattsburgh’s Simona Sharoni, were not covered, much less defended, in the Times during the study period. The broader trend of anti-BDS activity threatening college free speech was almost never touched upon, and when it was, it was given only a fraction of the pearl-clutching reserved for the lack of far-right professors or the mean things said about Trump supporters by undergrads.

A similar phenomenon emerged during the primaries, when reporters would parachute in to document the oppression of Hillary Clinton backers by Bernie Sanders supporters on college campuses; both conceits were based on the false notion that college campus should be 1-to-1 hospitable to all ideologies and candidates at all times. The idea that certain viewpoints—like supply-side economics, racial eugenics or a Eurocentric view of history—are underrepresented on campus because they aren’t intellectually credible is never entertained.”

http://fair.org/home/nyts-campus-free-speech-coverage-focuses-7-to-1-on-plight-of-right/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

I’ll be honest, I no longer have any patience for the whole free speech argument. It just feels so disingenuous and oppressive. There is a grain of a problem in there, and it just gets entirely blown out of scale so that I don’t even know how to engage with it anymore without getting way more upset wbout some random thing like the original intent of the constitution than I should be.

None of this is about the constitution.

Related: free speech isn’t principled, maybe one other

Related: NYT is not built for this