The Atlantic

What Magazines Can’t Do in the Age of #MeToo

By publishing Jian Ghomeshi, Ian Buruma revealed that he didn’t understand a major issue of our time.
Source: Mark Blinch / Reuters

Last week, the New York Review of Books published a long essay entitled “Reflections from a Hashtag” by the disgraced Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi, who was fired from his job at CBC in 2014 and then pilloried in the press when multiple women alleged that he had engaged them in non-consensual sexual violence. In the essay, Ghomeshi proposes to “inject nuance” into his “mass shaming.”

The response online was quick and vicious, and in an interview with the ’s editor, Ian Buruma, who took over the editorship in 2017, doubled down on his decision to publish the story. Since the #MeToo movement was full, as he put that he stepped down after being “convicted on Twitter, without any due process,” implying that his fate was much like Ghomeshi’s before him. Inevitably, some see the flap as just the latest troubling manifestation of a call-out culture in which free speech is at risk.

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