The online magazine Guernica, which I co-founded twenty years ago, published an essay in March that sparked an uproar among readers, staff and media, both mainstream and social.
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A day after its publication, I got to read the essay that provoked so much debate and ill feeling, a meditation on empathy during the siege of Gaza, and saw why. Where others over the magazine’s long history have narrated the personal to reveal the political, the essay’s writer appeared to focus on individual pain rather than collective suffering. In other words, the uneven structures of power behind the events reflected on were ignored.
Still, retracting it was not a consideration. The magazine has always stood by the writing, and the writers, it publishes.
Our change of thinking on this came about not in response to the outcry of objection, but from a communication by the essayist. The substance was that if taking the essay down was a course of action that seemed right to us, this would not get any objection from the writer.
The retraction provoked an even fiercer storm. Critics across the spectrum decried the move as censorship, a violation by Guernica of the essayist’s right to free speech.
This criticism overlooked or ignored a key fact. Amid the revels of righteous denunciation the one person not asserting that her freedom of speech had been trashed was the essayist herself.
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg called the move “cowardly.” PEN America wound up its rebuke with, “Those with a mission to foster discourse should do so by safeguarding the freedom to write, read, imagine, and tell stories—protecting liberties that will point us to a better future.” Eric Wemple, Washington Post media critic, declined my offer to discuss the retraction, and instead focused on my critique of the essay, published in Guernica, which he called smart—but “woefully short of a rationale for retracting it.”
Missing from the spirited debate was the same thing missing in the essay igniting it—a consideration of the lopsided power dynamics upholding the structures of media, specifically, and public discourse, at large. This first-person essay didn’t, as far as I know, break any of the traditional rules, standards or laws that require a retraction. The content wasn’t fabricated, plagiarized or libelous. Yet the essay was ultimately removed from Guernica’s pages for the same reason I assumed the author invited its retraction—it was, there was a strong sense, further wounding a historically silenced community already under siege.
Is freedom of speech all that much to hold onto if one has no forum in which to put that speech forward, no way to be heard?
This fight, impassioned if misdirected, over freedom of speech, was about something. Rather, two things. Does freedom to express one’s views implicitly extend to another guarantee, the right to be heard, even listened to? Does the act of speaking automatically entitle the speaker to a forum? To any forum?
Framing the question from the opposite perspective: Is freedom of speech all that much to hold onto if one has no forum in which to put that speech forward, no way to be heard?
In the United States, we adhere, or claim to adhere, to a bedrock belief in “free speech.” The bedrock image underlying this is “a marketplace of ideas.” The phrase itself evokes a vast ideology that we both take as a given and have devoted centuries to imposing on the rest of the world.
Advocates of free speech have, down over the centuries, cited Milton’s Areopagitica, hailed as one of history’s most influential anti-censorship arguments. The polemic, published as a pamphlet, makes a case for free exercise of the right to express one’s mind. At the same time, it posits that no authority can permit speech that is “impious or evil against faith and manners.” What Milton decried was not censorship, per se, but “licensing”—a mechanism whereby the state would not censor but authorize. Hypothetically, no work would be banned, as only state-sanctioned works could be published.
It’s impossible to have competition among ideas when the marketplace is monopolized, or rigged.
Why the state is prohibited from regulating speech is, for most of us, self-evident. Given such power, it would stifle dissent, prioritize its agenda, and creep towards autocracy. Yet we imagine the favored few in charge of the most far-reaching platforms would behave differently?
Those running media today, at all scales, wield the contemporary world’s licensing power. With the state prohibited, at least on paper, from impinging on free speech, media great and small are contracted as gatekeepers and arbiters. The power to license distributes, unevenly, among these supposed watchdogs.
In most of the West, we do have a nominal right of free speech. But not a right to be heard, much less to be paid attention to. Those are privileges. And they are brokered and assigned by an elite group whose self-soothing attachment to liberal ideas of equity disguise the reality of the marketplace, the commerce in ideas. This collective of the largely anonymous (and rarely accountable) includes those who criticized the retraction of the essay, those who decided to retract it, and those who published it in the first place. Crucially, this class also includes the essayist. The central question, though, is not who’s included in that class, but who’s excluded from it, and how that exclusion works.
Whether it’s by design or just a byproduct of market operations, a prominent effect of this is a severe curbing of contrasting and genuinely dissenting viewpoints. The media’s performance of “balance” finds insidious ways to create disparity. The magnanimity of the privileged, which reinforces the status quo and is easily revoked, doesn’t realign power dynamics, much less offer freedom. It’s the currently accepted way to maintain dependence and hold onto control.
Worse, major media blithely refuses to acknowledge a central role in the reproduction of disparity. These folks are deeply invested in the belief that censorship and deplatforming cause the same harm when wielded by marginalized communities, sometimes as a means of survival, as when they’re used by the powerful to systematically silence the disadvantaged.
As Arundhati Roy noted, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or preferably unheard.” Preferably unheard is not a demographic of great value to advertisers: no one particularly wants to mine their data, and they don’t work well as influencers. So the priorities of those most impacted by other forms of structural violence are ignored, or drastically suppressed and diluted to the point of becoming flotsam in a sea of well-heeled concerns and perspectives.
It’s impossible to have competition among ideas when the marketplace is monopolized, or rigged, where the minority have no purchasing power or ability to provision, and the priorities of the privileged overrun those of, well, everyone else.
Which is why there was never a chance the retracted essay would vanish from circulation. The author’s point of view and agenda fit snugly with much of mainstream media’s. Thus, shortly after it was taken down, the essay was republished in The Washington Monthly.
We claim to want a genuine diversity of voices in the marketplace of ideas, and for representatives from all groups to have access to the megaphones that amplify those voices. And when real suppression of voices occurs, we’re all obligated to call it out. But as long as we continue to obfuscate the meaning of censorship, without consideration of power structures, the belief that there’s such thing as free speech for all seems naive or, worse, disingenuous.