JAMES TARANTO: What They Mean by ‘Civility’: The New York Times raises no objection to murderous, racist rhetoric at a Common Cause rally.
The New York Times editorial page, a division of the New York Times Co., on Saturday endorsed Common Cause’s personal attack on Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. . . . That campaign took an even more sinister turn at a Common Cause protest Jan. 30, as we noted Thursday. Participants in the rally were captured on video advocating the assassination of Scalia, Thomas, Thomas’s wife and Chief Justice John Roberts. Two of them explicitly called for Justice Thomas, the court’s only black member, to be lynched. One man also asserted that Fox News president Roger Ailes “should be strung up,” adding: “Kill the bastard.”
A statement from Common Cause made clear that what it called these “hateful, narrow-minded sentiments”–rather a delicate way of describing lurid calls for murder–were contrary to the corporate position of the self-styled “grassroots organization.” But the Times editorial expresses no disapproval of the Common Cause supporters’ racist and eliminationist statements. . . . This is the same New York Times that, as we noted Jan. 11, seized on the attempted murder of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona to announce that “it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible” for a “gale of anger” that the Times claimed had set “the nation on edge”–even though it had already been established that the vicious crime in Arizona had nothing to do with Republicans or their “supporters in the media.”
By the Times’s standards, surely it is legitimate to hold Common Cause, and particularly its most virulent supporters in the media, responsible for the depraved sentiments expressed at the Common Cause rally. That the editorial said nothing at all about the subject is further evidence that the paper’s pieties about “civility” are fraudulent–a cheap exercise in partisanship and a thuggish attempt to burnish its own reputation by tearing down those of its media competitors.
Thuggish but ineffectual.
That’s likely to be the epitaph for Pinch Sulzberger’s version of the New York Times.