'Cancel Culture,' Hypocrisy, and Double Standards

Last Wednesday, a surge of Twitter outrage followed reports that Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, recently appointed Knight Chair in race and investigative journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, did not get the automatic tenure that should have come with that post because of political objections. (The 22-year-old Knight Chair program supports teaching by professional journalists with an emphasis on innovative digital-age journalism.)

The news was quickly deplored as an attack on freedom of the press and an example of “cancel culture” on the right, with the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy on the part of conservatives and “free speech warriors.”