Friday, July 24, 2020

‘Cancel Culture’ Has Become a Cudgel to Beat Back Any Criticism Without the Inconvenience of Actually Making Arguments: Judd Legum


Judd Legum of Popular Information outlined on Twitter what's going on at The Wall Street Journal, home of some of the best journalists in the world.

He writes:
WSJ reporters wrote a detailed letter noting numerous egregious factual errors in the WSJ opinion section.  
In response, the WSJ opinion editor made no effort to respond or address the errors. 
Instead, he promised to ignore the letter because it represented "cancel culture."
Legum goes on to say:
"Cancel culture" has become a cudgel to beat back any criticism without the inconvenience of actually making arguments. 
Since it has no definition, you can apply it to any situation.
As was noted in The Wall Street Journal's own coverage: “The letter doesn’t challenge the right of the editorial page to offer its own opinions and analysis."

The let­ter, signed by more than 280 re­porters, ed­i­tors and other em­ploy­ees says, “Opin­ion’s lack of fact-check­ing and transparency, and its ap­par­ent dis­re­gard for ev­i­dence, un­dermine our read­ers’ trust and our ability to gain cred­i­bil­ity with sources.”

This was WSJ Opinion's response:



UPDATE:


And the "cancel-culture cudgel" continues. I'm pretty sure people have laid out very sound reasons for changing the names of "our great Military Bases and Forts" ... but OK.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

WSJ is a Murdoch publication. Presenting opinion as news is their lifeblood