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Saturday, June 5, 2021

The Cost of Free Speech

     A sickening combination of political correctness, cultural touchiness, and the profit motive has killed the kind of rough and tumble journalism once practiced by H. L. Mencken and the more recently deceased Christopher Hitchens. Stephen Bloom, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa, once said some unflattering things about certain lower class Iowans. It was the kind of writing you rarely see anymore, especially from a professor. (If free speech has an arch enemy, it's the university.) The professor from Iowa paid a price for speaking his mind in print. (While Professor Bloom's writing is a good example of an elite academic attacking the white lower class from his ivory tower bubble, he didn't deserve the treatment he received for expressing his opinion.)

     In an essay Stephen Bloom wrote called, "Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life," published on December 9 2011 on The Atlantic magazine website, Bloom, in questioning whether Iowa was worthy of being the nation's first caucus state, portrayed certain Iowans in a pretty bad light. For example, he said the rural citizens of the state "...are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking education) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Anne, that 'the sun'll come out tomorrow.' " Bloom described the municipality of Keokuk as a "depressed, crime-infested slum town," and other Iowa communities as "skuzzy" and "slummy." 

     As could be expected, Bloom's opinions and observations angered and offended many people, including some of his fellow journalism professors; current and former students (particularly those from Keokuk); the university administration; local politicians (pandering idiots who probably shared  Bloom's opinion of these "hard-working Americans"); and of course rural Iowans with bad teeth and a drug habit.

       In response to his description of the lower rung of Iowa's socio-economic ladder, Professor Bloom received threatening emails which sent him into hiding until the firestorm of indignation burned itself out. (The following fall he was scheduled to teach a semester at the University of Michigan.) In discussing his situation to a media blogger, Bloom said, "...I don't want some of those crazy people who are reading everything they want into my story to know where I am." To avoid adding fuel to the fire, Professor Bloom turned down offers to appear on several cable TV news shows. (In reality, a couple cable news networks would have given him a hero's welcome.)

     Bloom's incendiary essay came at a time when the University of Iowa's master's degree program in journalism was in trouble. (Not to be confused with Iowa's famous Writer's Workshop.) The program lost its accreditation the previous year because it lacked a sufficient number of students. The undergraduate program, not doing well either, operated on provisional accreditation. David Perlmutter, the director of the journalism school, was worried that the Bloom flap would dissuade prospective journalism majors from applying to the program.

     To his credit, Perlmutter said this to the Des Moines Register, "I'm nobody's editor. I'm nobody's publisher. We don't want the kind of system where somebody has to send me something before it gets published, and I'm supposed to censor it."

     The president of the university, Sally Mason, apparently not a big fan of free speech, sent an open letter to The Atlantic disowning Professor Bloom and his essay. "Please know that he does not speak for the University of Iowa. What defines Iowans are their deeds and actions and not some caricature." If such a piece of public relations crap had been written by a graduate of the school's journalism program, the program wouldn't deserve accreditation. 

     Professor Bloom attributed all the fuss to the state's need to protect its first-in-the-nation caucuses. "There's a financial incentive for the Iowa media not to rock the caucuses' boat," he said. "Political advertising means revenue for newspapers, TV and radio stations."

     Fortunately for Professor Bloom he was tenured. Still, he probably would think twice before writing something like that again.

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