THE CODDLING OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM:

We are seeing this again and again at American left-of-centre magazines: they publish something or hire someone controversial, perhaps because they want to be interesting to readers. Their decisions — more than the authors or the arguments — cause controversy, so the magazines freak out and shut themselves up. We saw it with the Atlantic and Kevin Williamson, the New Yorker and Steve Bannon, and now with [Ian Buruma, formerly editor of the New York Review of Books].

What is going on? Toby Young says it is a new McCarthyism, Rick says it is part-McCarthyite, part-Soviet. I think it is connected to what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff call ‘the coddling of the American mind’.

We are used to reading about snowflakes on university campuses — so much so that it has become a right-wing cliché. But the snowflakes aren’t melting as they get older and wiser. They now have jobs in publishing and media and are marching through the institutions they work for. They are trying to create media safe spaces — places where their sensibilities cannot be harmed — and they are becoming more tactical in the ways they silence the voices they don’t like. What we are seeing with the Buruma story, in other words, is the coddling of American journalism.

Read the whole thing.