Via Politico, we learned on Friday, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet called a journalism professor at the USC Annenberg School an "asshole" on Facebook after the professor took a shot from the left at Baquet for not running Charlie Hebdo's Muhammed cartoons. He punched low for a liberal: he compared the Times to a staid insurance company.
On Friday, Cooper wrote a Facebook post questioning Baquet: "Exactly how many people have to be shot in cold blood before your paper rules that you can show us what provoked the killers?" he asked. "Apparently 23 shot including 11 dead is not enough. What absolute cowardice. These MSM managers act is if they are running insurance companies, not news organizations.”
Cooper is a hard-lefty who’s written media criticism articles for The Nation magazine over the years.
"Dear Marc," Baquet shot back, "appreciate the self righteous second guessing without even considering there might be another point of view. Hope your students are more open minded. Asshole."
Reached via email, Baquet told Politico: "Lots of people have disagreed with my decision. Some of them are in The Times. I get that. Mr Cooper's comment was nasty and arrogant. So I told him what I thought."
Baquet's decision to forego running the cartoons that provoked terrorists to raid the offices of Charlie Hebdo, killing 12, have been heavily scrutinized. On Thursday, Baquet said he made his decision primarily because he did not want to insult the paper's Muslim readers.
"We have a standard that is pretty simple. We don't run things that are designed to gratuitously offend," Baquet told Politico. "[O]bviously [I] don't expect all to agree. But let's not forget the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet. I don't give a damn about the head of ISIS but I do care about that family and it is arrogant to ignore them."
JimRomenesko.com noted in another comment on his Facebook wall, Cooper added: “You just happen to be wrong. man. I call you that instead of your word ‘asshole’ as I try to meet long standing standards we have here of decency and refrain from insulting, as you put it.” Baquet complained: “Your note was thoughtless and arrogant. It didn’t invite argument.”
As if The New York Times usually "invites argument" in its own liberal arrogance and one-sidedness.
The initial fight looked like this:
Moe Lane at RedState offered a counterpoint to all this talk of editors being like insurance company execs:
Given that Dean Baquet is giving an excellent impression of being a petulant man-child generally, I imagine that that last charge in particular stung. And when one’s response to criticism by one’s superiors is to punch the wall, just imagine how one must feel when an outsider does it…
Baquet never actually answered Cooper’s question. How many dead people will need to be murdered before the New York Times stops being a pacifier for its readership, and starts telling – and showing them – the things that they need to know?
Lastly: this specific flap would not have happened if the New York Times would simply insist that its staff only post to social media (during work hours, and/or in a professional capacity) in a respectful and adult matter. In case anybody hasn’t mentioned it to Dean Baquet: that means you don’t call people a*sholes in your official capacity of NYT’s Executive Editor.
