Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Curtis Houck rants in an April 5 post:
In another sign of extreme cowardice and censorship of conservatives, The Atlantic and editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg decided to firemconservative and former National Review writer Kevin Williamson on Thursday after just over two weeks since the announcement following vicious backlash to the hiring.
The excuse was holding a pro-life position about women aborting children facing the death penalty, but the reality is that it only served as an excuse to pull the trigger.
Goldberg made the announcement in a Thursday memo to staff that Williamson “is not the best fit for his talents, and so we are parting ways” because his view in a podcast and previous tweets about women who have abortions and the death penalty were “contrary to The Atlantic’s tradition of respectful, well-reasoned debate, and to the values of our workplace.”
The cowardly EIC argued that he thought “Kevin would represent an important addition to our roster of Ideas columnists, and I addressed the controversy surrounding some of his past tweeting and writing” because “no one’s life work should be judged by an intemperate tweet, and that such an episode should not necessarily stop someone from having a fruitful career at The Atlantic.”
Of course, Goldberg peddled fake news when he made that argument as the views Williamson has on abortion were the exact reason that will prevent him “from having a fruitful career at The Atlantic.”
The gutless Goldberg claimed that Williamson’s stance “was also a centerpiece of a podcast discussion in which Kevin explained his views on the subject of the death penalty and abortion” and that Goldberg, in his infinite wisdom, realized that the former National Review correspondent’s stance was “his carefully considered views” and not a one-off tweet.
[...]
To recap, The Atlantic still maintains far-left writers such as Peter Beinart, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Adam Serwer, and Alex Wagner, but Williamson was fired solely because of his conservatism. Nevermind the fact that he was anything but a Trump supporter; the reality that he was still let go shows how the left’s censorship has no limits.
A couple things here. First: Houck provides no evidence that executing women who have an abortion is a mainstream "pro-life" view. He cites no mainstream anti-abortion activists who hold that view --indeed, the mainstream anti-abortion movement regularly denies that it has a goal of doing so. That makes Williamson's view an extreme one, and one for which Williamson was justly fired.
Which brings us to our second thing: Houck is engaging in lies and projection by falsely painting Williamson's firing as a larger attack on conservatives. He has no facts on which to base his claim that Goldberg was issuing "fake news" on the reason for Williamson's firing, and calling Goldberg "cowardly" and "gutless" is simply classless name-calling. Houck's gratutious attacking of other Atlantic columnists as "far-left" is one that the MRC has engaged in to the point of meaninglessness. He cites no instances of those columnists advocating the execution of people engaging in currently legal behavior.
Houck rants about "the left’s censorship," but his employer's "news" division, CNSNews.com, has no columnists, let alone employees, who are anything but conservative. Houck should address bias on his own home turf first before casting stones elsewhere.
