The Triumph of Free-Speech Hypocrisy

On Sunday night Bari Weiss, the editor of The Free Press and the new head of CBS News, abruptly stopped a forthcoming 60 Minutes report on the torture endured by migrants in the brutal El Salvadoran prison CECOT, where the Trump administration has sent more than 280 men. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Michele Crowe / CBS / Getty. Trump supporters praised the decision from Weiss, who, notwithstanding her description of conditions at CECOT as “horrific,” had previously praised El Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele for making El Salvador safer. More broadly, the whole affair neatly encapsulates the bizarre anti-free-speech free-speech discourse of the past decade, the purpose of which has been to justify restricting any speech that conservatives disapprove of while framing liberal censoriousness as equivalent to state censorship. According to Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who reported the segment, the story had already been reviewed by CBS News’s legal and standards departments before it was pulled. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct,” Alfonsi wrote in an email that was leaked to The New York Times and other outlets. “In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” The reason this whole saga is disturbing is that many observers-Alfonsi among them-interpreted it as an instance of state censorship by proxy: the head of a news organization putting the brakes on a story the government would rather not air. Weiss was recently installed at the head of CBS News by Paramount’s new owner, the pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison , which illustrates the risks of media consolidation, creating a single pressure point for an authoritarian government to coerce obedience if it so chooses. Editors, of course, hold or spike stories all the time, for many legitimate reasons. And although many newsrooms require review by legal and standards departments for the most complicated stories, editorial independence dictates that the editor makes the final call on whether a story should move forward. But Alfonsi’s account calls Weiss’s reasoning into question. By Monday night, the unpublished segment was circulating like samizdat on social media, yet another example of regular people demonstrating a greater commitment to democratic principles than America’s leaders. Weiss has long been a vocal supporter of a curiously narrow definition of free speech. That hypocrisy, shared by many, brought us to where we are today: Nasty tweets were a harbinger of incipient totalitarianism , but now the Trump administration is trying to imprison and deport people for pro-Palestinian advocacy, and it’s fine. The “PC Police” were trying to “ outlaw make-believe ,” but when Republican states ban books from schools and public libraries , it’s fine. These dumb lefties believe that words are violence , but when the federal government says left-wing speech is violence worthy of firing or prosecution , it’s fine. Protests on college campuses were a national crisis , but now that...

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