Breaking news about the news! This morning, I heard a segment on NPR that actually helped me understand something beyond the left/right, good/bad framing!
It was about Charlie Kirk’s Professor Watchlist, a nonprofit designed “to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
To many of us, the list probably seemed like a right-wing version of the chilling Transgender Map, which is essentially a digital Wanted poster for wrong-thinkers on gender issues. (I’m not linking to it, but here’s a good explainer by Jesse Singal.) Wasn’t Professor Watchlist just another blacklist of wrong-thinkers, too, designed to discredit and punish left-leaning professors? Isn’t that just right-wing cancel culture, Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep asked.
Not exactly, said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley:
I'm not sure you would call it cancel culture, and that listing was designed because conservatives and Republicans have largely been purged from departments. Surveys show many departments now don't have a single Republican left, and the result is that there's a type of captive audience for students who are middle to right, where they find themselves in these proselytizing classrooms, and the listing was supposed to identify those professors to avoid. It was basically started by students and these existed in different forms saying, look, this is one you wanna stay away from. And the students actually valued it. Now you can call that a cancel campaign or you can that simply information…"
That is, rather than just reinforce NPR listeners’ views of Republicans as censorious bigots, the segment widened the context. Few listeners probably know that this was the case on college campuses, and that “our” side helped create it.
Now that our attorney general is threatening to expel people who’ve said the “wrong” thing about Kirk, we can start to understand that both sides have engaged in the same actions. As I often say: same sin, different sinner. We call it hate speech when our side doesn’t like what’s being said. We call for free speech when our own speech is called hateful.
It’s called hypocrisy, and, as Turley pointed out, it’s flowing like water. “There’s hypocrisy on all sides here,” he said. “Many of the people objecting today, particularly in academia, never voiced any objections when conservatives were being investigated, canceled, and terminated.”
I wonder how many listeners had an a-ha moment this morning. I hope a lot.
NPR wasn’t the only site of post-assassination introspection. Ezra Klein, reacting to Kirk’s death, wrote that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way”—a piece that, he later lamented, caused more polarization among readers than anything else he’d ever penned.
Just before Kirk’s death, he’d reached all the way to the other side, to talk to the very popular and very right-wing media mogul Ben Shapiro. The resulting episode was titled, “We’re Going to Have to Live With Each Other.” Because, yeah, if we don’t want to murder each other, we’re going to have to coexist.
Unlike many who focused solely on Kirk, insisting, falsely, that the left is more prone to political violence than the right, Klein pointed out that there’s much more political violence in general. “Because it’s not just Kirk,” he wrote.
A man tried to burn Josh Shapiro and his family alive in their home. A man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home to kidnap her and, when he didn’t find her, he fractured her husband’s skull with a hammer. The former speaker of the Minnesota House and her husband were assassinated. The chief executive officer of UnitedHealthCare was gunned down in Midtown Manhattan, and many lionized his killer.
Some are saying that trying to commune with those on the other side is no longer possible, that Kirk’s murder means war is inevitable. But I disagree. The media makers, thought leaders, narrative-constructors—they can follow Klein’s and Inskeep’s leads and resist flattening complicated issues into good versus bad. They can do what journalists are supposed to: offer readers and listeners enough context and information to make up their own minds. They can complicate things for us, meld the black and white into shades of gray.
Many people are afraid to live in a world like that, where little is clear. I’m afraid to live in a world that isn’t like that.
I’m so pleased you heard that segment and posted it here. It was one of few things in this bleak period that gave me hope—including through a more complex understanding of the watch list. A good example of what you so justly note is what journalists are supposed to do: “offer readers and listeners enough context and information to make up their own minds. They can complicate things for us, meld the black and white into shades of gray.” Thank you for this post, for this glimmer of hope, and for your own efforts, as a journalist and person, to model what journalists should do in your own work.🙏👏🙏
“Trans rights” activists have been intimidating gender critical voices on college campuses for years now. As one example among many, Carole Hooven was hounded out of her job at Harvard for saying sex is real. I’m willing to bet that NPR said absolutely nothing about that. Ditto most of the MSM. The hypocrisy is absolutely breathtaking.