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2019-10-14 Home Front: Culture Wars
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The Age of Mutual Assured Cancellation
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h/t Instapundit
[CityJournal] A modest proposal for my fellow journalists: Could we declare a bipartisan amnesty for the stupid things people did in high school and college‐or at least stop pretending that these things have any relevance in judging a middle-aged adult’s professional competence?
I realize that this suggestion will trouble the many liberal journalists who have worked diligently to reveal what might or might not have happened at a party at Yale that might or might not have been attended by Brett Kavanaugh during his freshman year. (The definitive conclusion from thousands of hours of investigative reporting: people at the party were really drunk.) Nor will it appeal to the conservatives now savoring the seemingly endless series of photos of a young Justin Trudeau in blackface. (The Babylon Bee, a news-satire site, delivered the coup de grace: "Rare Photo Surfaces of Trudeau Not in Blackface.")
I also realize that it’s futile to appeal to my colleagues’ sense of perspective or feelings of compassion. These qualities have always been in short supply in our profession, and they’re rarer than ever in the age of "cancel culture." We can convince ourselves that anything is newsworthy if it embarrasses the other side and generates enough clicks. Exactly how many beers did Kavanaugh drink in high school? A nation’s fate is at stake! Precisely how many parties in the early 1990s did Trudeau attend in blackface? The public has a right to know!
...But now journalists have a selfish reason to behave decently: mutual assured cancellation, a strategic doctrine that has emerged from the recent media furor involving Carson King, a security guard in Iowa. He’d become a media sensation after holding up a sign on ESPN’s College GameDay asking people to send him money so that he could buy Busch Light beer. As the money rolled in, he decided to redirect it from beer to charity, raising more than $1 million for a children’s hospital. Anheuser-Busch kicked in money and planned to include him in a marketing campaign.
It should have been a feel-good story, but then a Des Moines Register reporter unearthed a couple of racist jokes that King had tweeted seven years earlier, when he was 16.
...The Register was besieged by readers outraged at its treatment of King, and they didn’t just write letters to the editor. They retaliated by studying the social-media history of Aaron Calvin, the reporter who had written the article‐and who’d made a few offensive posts of his own, before joining the paper.
...As a form of deterrence, mutual assured cancellation‐let’s call it MAC‐should not be underestimated.
...So long as journalists had a monopoly on public shaming, they were happy to judge yesterday’s behavior by today’s standards.
Now that social media has ended that monopoly, non-journalists can pass judgment, too, and they’re following Alinksy’s rule number 4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." Journalists would be wise to rewrite these rules, and to remember the adage about people in glass houses. In the age of MAC, everyone has stones. 
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Posted by g(r)omgoru 2019-10-14 04:43||
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Posted by Nguard 2019-10-14 10:01||
2019-10-14 10:01||
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Posted by Lex 2019-10-14 10:40||
2019-10-14 10:40||
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Posted by Procopius2k 2019-10-14 16:09||
2019-10-14 16:09||
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