When I first read about “The Letter,” I thought of the 1967 hit by the Box Tops.  The chorus goes like this:

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
Ain’t got time to take a fast train
Lonely days are gone
I’m a-goin’ home
My baby just a-wrote me a letter

But in 2020 “The Letter” refers to “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in the July issue of Harpers Magazinethat was signed by 153 artists, writers and intellectuals.  The letter repudiates the cancel culture and calls for:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is becoming more constricted.  While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance for opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.  We uphold the values of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.

The letter ends by stating, in part:

The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.  We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.  As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.  We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

Among the 153 people who signed the letter were five columnists from The New York Times: three liberals (Roger Cohen, Michelle Goldberg and Jennifer Senior) and two conservatives (David Brooks and Bari Weiss).  Interestingly, a week after the letter was published signatory Bari Weiss resigned from the Times in a fiery letter that accused the Times’s editorial decisions to be driven by a woke, cancel culture designed to appeal to a narrow slice of its readers, as determined by Twitter.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times.  But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.  As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.  Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.  I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history.  Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

The Times ran letters that both supported Weiss and that did not support her.  However, the two letters, the one Weiss signed and the one she wrote, bring up an interesting question:  Has the switch from an advertising-driven business model to a subscription-driven business model changed the editorial/opinion decisions of the Times?

Many journalism historians and theorists have written that the switch in newspapers’ business model from dependency on government, church or political party revenue to a dependency on advertising revenue made most newspapers less partisan and more objective.  Thus, the principle of journalistic objectivity was primarily an economic decision, not a journalistic one.  This principle of objectivity – news down the middle – was adopted by radio news and later by television news.  In local television station news and in network news, this down-the-middle approach reigned supreme, and by being non-partisan Walter Cronkite became “the most trusted man in America.”  Not pissing off either side of the political spectrum was profitable.

The notion that dependency on advertising made news producers and publishers freer and less partisan may have had some credibility when applied to the political spectrum, but not to those on the economic spectrum.  The New York Times was founded on the value proposition of appealing to the business class, to the upper-middle and upper class as defined by economics.  The Times was consistent in its approach to appealing to an economically high-end audience (which also means an educated audience). 

In contrast Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post’s appeal is to working class readers.  There is a story, probably apocryphal, that at a social event Murdoch asked the CEO of Bloomingdale’s why the tony department store didn’t advertise in the NY Post.  The Bloomingdale’s executive’s apparent answer was, “Because your readers are our shoplifters.”

This elitist (and probably racist) viewpoint tends to permeate advertising-revenue driven publications that produce content that appeals to consumers who have money and who advertisers want to reach.  But where is the content bias of publications that have a subscription-driven model?  Does money talk?  Does subscriber bias replace advertiser bias?

These questions bring us back to The Letter, to the concept that there should be a free exchange of ideas and opinions, and that these ideas and opinions should compete freely in a marketplace of ideas so citizens can decide for themselves. 

Just as the principle of objectivity was driven by economics, I think the principle of giving a respectful voice to different sides of an argument will win out eventually because of, once again, economics.  By respectful, I mean that any position must respect the rules of debate and not be an ad hominin, personal attack but should attack only ideas and the other side’s arguments, assumptions and logic.

Therefore, no one asked me to sign The Letter, but I enthusiastically support it.

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
Ain’t got time to take a fast train
Lonely days are gone
I’m a-goin’ home
My baby just a-wrote me a letter