Back in November, Professor Jordan Peterson took part in a debate on free speech at the University of Toronto. The Globe and Mail’s Simona Chiose reported on the event. Here are the first words of her article: “The claims made by University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson on the impact of anti-discrimination legislation are scientifically and legally wrong.”
Here’s a question: whose side do you think Chiose (and the Globe) are on? That is, is the article for or against the position taken by Dr. Peterson? Do you think that that opening sentence represents a sincere attempt to avoid bias while writing a report on a controversial event, or does it rather push the reader in the direction of a particular point of view? (If you click on the link, you’ll see that the sentence actually ends with a subordinate clause: “… a debate at the Toronto university heard on Saturday.” This does mitigate the effect of the whole, but the effect is there nonetheless.)
I was bothered at the time by the article, and I’ve just had reason to think of it again, for last week the same Ms. Chiose wrote another article on Dr. Peterson, this one much longer and more biased than that earlier one (quotations below are from this more recent article unless otherwise noted). This longer piece omits relevant facts and emphasises marginal material so as to create a distorted picture, one that effectively maligns Dr. Peterson’s character. In what follows, I’m going to go through several examples of this tendency (though not all), to show just how far the article falls short of fair and unbiased reporting. Has Ms. Chiose – and with her, the Globe – abandoned reporting and instead plunged headlong into activism? After considering the points I make below, I hope readers will be able to decide for themselves.
The main force of Chiose’s article comes from the connection it attempts to make between Dr. Peterson and certain internet trolls (this includes the ‘KEK’ primer at the end), so let us start with that. These trolls, we are told, say vicious and (perhaps) threatening things about his critics. Chiose tells us that “the existence of this parallel, online space is hardly mentioned in free speech debates or arises only in lateral mentions of concerns about ‘safety on campus.’” What she never makes explicit is why this parallel space should be mentioned in free speech debates. No doubt it is true that there are too many trolls online posting childish, vicious and (possibly) even threatening things; no doubt there is often “misogynist and dehumanizing invective” online. This is awful, but why should it have any bearing on the question of free speech or safety on campus? No evidence has been offered that the trolls in question are on the UofT campus. Neither the UofT, nor the government of Ontario, nor the government of Canada – and certainly not Dr. Peterson – can control what people in “Shanghai and Berlin, St. Petersburg and Pune… and San Francisco” write online. Why on earth should the rantings of some loser in his parents’ basement in, say, Colorado, affect what people may and may not say on a university campus in Toronto? Yes, online trolls can be vile, and it would be nice to be able to treat the problem they present, but they seem to me a red herring when considering freedom of speech on campus. Indeed, they seem to me entirely irrelevant in relation to the matter at the heart of the Peterson affair, namely, these new pronouns, and whether the government or any other institution has the right to force people to use them.
There is one respect, however, in which Ms. Chiose’s focus on internet trolls is not a red herring at all, but drives a point home with some force, and that is the realm of insinuation, of guilt by association. Obviously Dr. Peterson cannot control people typing away in distant cities around the globe, but look at how rotten (or crazy) those people are, those people who support Dr. Peterson – doesn’t that make him look like a rotten person as well? If this thought can, strictly speaking, have no bearing on the matter of pronouns and free speech, still it can have considerable rhetorical force. Empty rhetoric can be effective – in this case, it might encourage those who shout Dr. Peterson down (see below), or those who want a reason to avoid having to confront the force of his arguments, to think that they’re doing the right thing.
It is not only by means of the connection to online trolls, however, that Chiose’s piece paints its picture of Dr. Peterson. As an introduction to her other methods, let us consider some words from Dr. Peterson. At a recent talk at Harvard (video here, the relevant bit is from 6:04) he discusses the behaviour of the UofT’s administration: “the university said that they had received many letters accusing me of making the University of Toronto an unsafe space… they failed to note at the same time that they had received hundreds – perhaps thousands – of letters, as well as a 10,000 signature petition, supporting my stance.” He considers this a falsification by omission.
Chiose’s article suffers from a similar failing. In general, the claims of the UofT administration, as well as accusations against Dr. Peterson, are treated as reliable. Facts that might throw a different, and more positive light upon Dr. Peterson or his cause, repeatedly go unmentioned. For example, we do not hear of the letters of support that he claims to have received from trans-people, who, he says, express their frustration at the fact that a group of activists claim (wrongly) to represent them, and have in fact made their lives more difficult (see here from about 12:43). Is Dr. Peterson making all this up? I don’t know; Chiose might have made an attempt to verify his claims. Instead, the reader is simply left unaware of the possibility of another side to this story.
Consider this sentence as well: “after his application for a federal research grant was turned down this year, Rebel Media… started a crowdfunding effort on its own site on the professor’s behalf.” It would have been worth mentioning at this point that Dr. Peterson claims that his research has been continually highly ranked, and successfully funded, for more than two decades – until this particular grant proposal. If true, it is remarkable that he suddenly failed to get funding the moment he declared himself against the forced use of certain pronouns. This seems to me very relevant indeed to the question of free speech on campus, unlike the internet trolls on whom Chiose lavishes so much attention. Most importantly, we once again see that facts that might have put Dr. Peterson’s cause in a more sympathetic light have been left out.
Consider also the following: “‘no one wanted him to be fired or put in jail…,’ said Cassandra Williams, who was the equity officer for the University of Toronto Students Union throughout the crisis.” Of course, if you have heard Dr. Peterson himself talk about this (see here from about 6:45), you get a different impression: before you fire a professor, there have to be warning letters. He received one, then another. His response was to go for maximum publicity, and he has since been all over YouTube, talking with Gad Saad, with Dave Rubin, with Joe Rogan (among many others), getting millions of hits, and becoming something of an internet celebrity in the process. Having followed this strategy, Peterson was not fired. A teacher in BC, who wanted to remain anonymous, was not so lucky, and was fired. Dr. Peterson was apparently contacted by this anonymous teacher, and advised him, in vain, to follow the publicity route as a means of protection. Did publicity save Dr. Peterson’s job? I don’t know. Maybe Ms. Williams, quoted above, is being entirely accurate. I note only that there was another side to this, and that Ms. Chiose (again) hasn’t mentioned it.
I don’t intend to enumerate every failing in the article, but I will mention one final omission that is particularly serious. Have you seen the videos of Dr. Peterson getting shouted down at McMaster University? (Watch this one from about 3:15) I don’t doubt that there are horrible internet trolls who have taken Dr. Peterson’s side, and behaved reprehensibly in the process (though I also don’t see that there’s much he can do about that – indeed, any issue involving intense disagreement these days is going to be accompanied by people saying vile things online). It is, however, grossly misleading to suggest that this is a problem on only one side of this debate. Indeed, such vile behaviour from so many of Dr. Peterson’s opponents might go some way to explain the reprehensible behaviour of some of his supporters.
Considered in the light of what happened at McMaster, it is simply extraordinary that the article’s subtitle talks of “the fight for ‘free speech,’” putting “free speech” in quotations marks as if this were somehow a dishonest pretense and not the actual substance of Dr. Peterson’s concern. How does that McMaster video not prove that free speech is genuinely at issue here? And, of course, all this takes place in the context of similar episodes elsewhere – go look up the cases of Charles Murray, of Heather Macdonald, or of Bret Weinstein!
It is not only errors of omission that give us a one-sided picture. Both of Chiose’s articles mentioned above contain a rather marvelous example of how language can be chosen so as to suggest that a certain side of a disagreement is at fault, without actually saying as much. In that article from November, we hear of “weeks of controversy on campus over Dr. Peterson’s refusal to use non-gender-specific pronouns when addressing students.” We might instead have heard of “an attempt by activists and the university administration to force the active use of certain words on other people,” but that phrasing would fail to place the onus for the whole business on Dr. Peterson: it is he, not the activists, who is to be seen as the cause of controversy here, even though he was reacting to them (and see the longer article, which I have been focusing on, for a similar choice of phrase in the first sentence). There are plenty of other examples of this sort of thing; try going through the article yourself and looking for them.
Clearly, these are controversial matters, productive of vehement passions, and for that reason, potentially dangerous. Ms. Chiose tells us of people on her side of the debate – and I think she has taken a side – who were willing to speak only on condition of anonymity, and this is no less true of people on the other side (this may shock you, but ‘Babbington’ is not my real name). In such a situation, surely we ought to aim at ratcheting down the tension, and to proceed as dispassionately as possible, so as to consider the case made by either side on its own merits. Ms. Chiose’s piece does something very different: it creates the impression that Dr. Peterson is a bad person. We are not provided with evidence or arguments that correct intellectual mistakes he has made; rather, we are given the impression that he has failed morally, as a person. If someone has failed intellectually, we reason with him; if he has failed morally, we might be inclined to proceed differently.
I think Simona Chiose should have the right to write opinion pieces on this and other matters, but they should be labelled as such. It is one thing to take a side explicitly and argue its case openly, but another altogether to produce a one-sided account of a controversy while writing what appears on the surface to be sand objective piece of reporting (this article is found online under “Home->News->National->Education”). I think the Globe and Mail dropped the ball here. As someone originally from the left (in Canada I have only ever voted for the NDP), I have to say this has made the notion of a “liberal media,” which reports selectively according to a preferred narrative, look rather more plausible than it previously had.
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And now for a few words about the larger controversy…
As I have watched this Peterson Affair unfold in recent months, I have repeatedly been impressed by his ability to make his case. For example, watch this video from about 7:30 to at least 19:00: Peterson is faced here with a questioner, who tries to push the other side of the argument, but the questioner is no match for him at all. On the matter of gender, see 24:46 to 28:55 of the same video. After watching him here, it should be obvious why he is not afraid to debate on this subject: he can present his position in a devastatingly effective, and utterly convincing, manner.
I have not been impressed by the arguments of the other side. I would like to see an answer to the points made in the video sections I have just referenced. Unfortunately, Dr. Peterson’s opponents seem to see any and all disagreement as a form of bigotry; overwhelmingly, when I see his opponents, they focus almost entirely on ad hominem attacks and scarcely at all – if at all – on meeting the substance of his arguments. (Which side of that divide do you think Simona Chiose’s article falls on?) Why don’t they just put the personal attacks to one side – heck, we can assume for the sake of argument that he’s an awful person – and refute the substantive points he has made? Why won’t they debate him? I believe this is because they know they cannot answer his arguments. (I am aware of only one debate that has taken place, and it was not impressive for the anti-Peterson side: I thought Christie Blatchford gave a good overview – and note how her piece is marked “COMMENT,” indicating it contains the personal views of its author.)
A final matter: why I am spending so much energy on this? Why, for that matter, are so many people giving him so much money? (as of this writing, he’s over $42k per month) Simona Chiose might like to think that we Peterson supporters are driven by dark motives, but I can offer another reason. Many of us are dismayed by the replacement of a culture of argument and open discussion with a culture of threats and intimidation, with the constant use of accusations of bigotry as a cudgel to silence dissent. Many of us think Dr. Peterson is correct in his warnings about the totalitarian – yes, totalitarian – nature of the way in which all of this is moving.
In a healthy society, universities are not merely repositories of knowledge and practical skills, but also have a civic function: they produce in their students an attitude of critical inquiry and the habit of frank and open debate on matters even of passionate controversy. As those disgraceful, idiot McMaster students so clearly showed, universities today are producing very different attitudes and habits. Newspapers, too, have a civic function fostering informed debate on contentious issues as part of an open society – or at least they once had such a function.
Dr. Peterson has said (I can’t find his exact words), there are, in the end, two ways of dealing with people: either you talk things out, or you use force. University administrations that fail to act against students who behave on campus in a thuggish manner, and the publications that effectively cheer them on, are effectively deciding that we are to have a more violent political culture in the future.
Where we once might have debated contentious matters in a frank and open manner, today it seems that a group of activists decides what the new orthodoxy is to be, and anyone who tries to argue otherwise is denounced and publicly shamed as a bigot. This needs to change, and that, in the end, is why Dr. Peterson is so important. It’s also why I think he deserves every penny he’s receiving. Certainly he has endured appalling abuse and pressure with exceptional grace and goodwill (far more than I would have mustered), but much more importantly, he has stepped in to defend, as best he can, the civic good that universities are now failing uphold as institutions, and that’s something worth far more than he has so far received. That, above all, is why he has received so much support.
UPDATE 26.01.2018
Oops, she did it again! Here’s the opening sentence of a piece written in November by Dr. Chiose on Dr. Peterson:
‘A plan by University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson to launch a website that would allow students to identify leftist faculty has “created a climate of fear and intimidation” and is a “threat to [professors] and to the academic mission of the University,” the school’s faculty association says.’ (Note also the headline: ‘Jordan Peterson creating climate of “fear and intimidation”: U of T’s faculty association’)
She used the very same device as in the piece I mentioned at the start of my post: once again, the reader is being nudged in the direction of a particular point of view, and – surprise! – once again, it’s one that paints Dr. Peterson in a particularly bad light.
The last six months have seen me become increasingly distraught with regard to the state of our media. Major media have an important role to play in public deliberation, and increasingly I feel they are failing.
UPDATE 29.12.2018
A final example of Dr. Chiose’s reporting on Dr. Peterson from way back in October 2016, when it seemed impressive to describe him as having “more than 10,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel” and “more than 20,000 Twitter followers” (he now has 1.7 million YouTube subscribers and over a million Twitter followers). Once again, Dr. Chiose provides a master class in how to frame an issue in a manner that directs readers towards a particular stance on an issue while maintaining the pretense of straightforward journalistic reporting. The impression we are given is that opposition to Dr. Peterson is widespread: “from every corner of the university, the criticism has been swift.” We hear from numerous people who disagree with Dr. Peterson: “transgendered students and supporters,” a student in linguistics at UofT, a professor emeritus of philosophy, a physics professor who uses the pronoun ‘they.’ Even what we hear of the university and the chair of Dr. Peterson’s department (psychology) suggests their skepticism towards him. What we do not hear is even one word from a single person who agrees with him. The only nod in that direction begins with the limiting clause, “insofar as Dr. Peterson’s opposition has found support…” The impression given is of a lone individual facing an overwhelming tide of condemnation. In fact, Dr. Chiose makes this all but explicit when she writes, “Dr. Peterson is swimming against a national movement of increased recognition for transgendered students across the country.” (With the benefit of hindsight, we may wonder if this sentence was entirely accurate.)
If readers believe that Dr. Peterson stands alone, that he is “swimming against a national movement,” they will be less likely to declare their support for him. Indeed, it seems to me that people are less inclined to decide at all that they agree with a position that is unpopular. Accordingly, Dr. Chiose has written in a manner likely to depress support for him and to lend support to his opponents. Is this reporting or left-wing activism?
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