Quoting the NYT/Athletic:
Matt Calkins, a columnist for the sports section of The Seattle Times, said he had resigned this month after editors refused to publish a column he wrote about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.
I’ll defer to PacNorthwest expert John Canzano on what that media scene is like, but this all tracks. Calkins published the spiked column on his new Substack and it’s quite reasonable. It’s pretty hard to argue with, which could have something to do with why online objectors mostly resort to sneering rather than substance.
It might sound trivial, but over time, the empty sneering impulse consumed and destroyed much of official media. I believe that this social media-fueled contagion of reflexive, memetic mockery is more important than the trans sports issue itself. Why? Because it informed mainstream media reactions on any matter of dispute. It explains why so many involved in the profession lost an ability to think critically, out loud. When every objection to your group’s consensus is dismissed with fact-free scorn, how can an industry function reasonably? This is how a once influential cohort finds itself on the wrong side of an 80/20 issue. They don’t allow for the idea of ideas.
So what’s being policed so vigorously here, if the game isn’t necessarily about “ideas”? The battle, which Calkins ran afoul of in Seattle, is actually about who warrants public empathy if not sympathy. In the competitive attention economy of social media, journalists have internalized the finite nature of collective focus. The worst ideological crime in this environment isn’t failing factually; it’s telling people to focus on the “wrong” victim.