George Will Meets the Clerisy Media | The American Spectator
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch shows liberal tolerance.
The Clerisy Media strikes again. This time the target is longtime conservative columnist George Will, who was dispatched by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch over a column on rape. But before that? The Los Angeles Times refused to publish letters to the editor from what the paper called “climate change deniers.” The Arizona Daily Sun has done the same.
A while back it was National Public Radio firing Juan Williams for comments made on Fox News about Muslims.
Then there were the campaigns to “Drop Dobbs” from CNN because of Lou Dobbs's views on immigration, remove Rush Limbaugh because of his comments about Sandra Fluke, fire Glenn Beck from his Fox News show, and throw Pat Buchanan off of MSNBC because of a varied list of offenses. Dobbs quit and moved to Fox, Rush’s audience rallied and dropped the sponsors dropping Rush, Beck and Buchanan lost their jobs.
But let’s first focus on George Will and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Here’s the syndicated Will column that started this latest round of conservative headhunting. Will’s point was clear: the alleged “epidemic” of rape on college campuses isn’t—as illustrated by statistics from the Obama administration itself. The column began:
Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.
For this latest affront, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch announced they were dropping Will’s column. Said Tony Messenger, the paper’s editor: “The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it.” Messenger also said, as the backlash to the paper’s decision grew, reported here at the Wrap:
“We had a lot of readers very angry and very hurt,” Messenger said. “It caused us to go back and take a look at it, and it reinforced our previous decision that he had lost a little bit of speed off his fastball, and it caused us to make the decision a little bit more quickly than we would have otherwise.”
Speaking on CNN, Messenger said:
“A lot of the responses that were negative to our decision accused us of doing so for political correctness,” Messenger added. “That’s not the case. We believe that the column trivializes sexual assault victims.”
The other day, radio host Hugh Hewitt had Messenger on his show. In this appearance—which Messenger cut short, hanging up on his host—some interesting facts emerge about the mindset of those running the Post-Dispatch:
HH: Did you, so you are agreeing there is no place where a factual inaccuracy exists in Mr. Will’s column?-go to link-
TM: To the best of my knowledge, no, there is not, and we did not correct one.
HH: All right, and so the column just offended you and your folks because of the representations it made. Now I have a factual question in your years as an opinion columnist, and you’ve written opinion columns for a long time, haven’t you?
TM: Yes, I have.
HH: Have you ever written an opinion column mentioning Juanita Broaddrick or Kathleen Willey?
TM: To the best of my memory, no, but it just doesn’t ring a bell right now.
HH: Do you know who they are?
TM: No.
HH: They are the women that President Clinton assaulted,...
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