Media Censorship on Display

from The Gray Area:

For this opinion, George Will lost his column in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, calling the conservative pundit’s recent commentary on sexual assault “offensive and inaccurate” and apologizing for its publication.

Read and decide for yourself. Will wrote in part:
“…in 2013 a student [at Swarthmore College] was in her room with a guy with whom she’d been hooking up for three months”…

“Six weeks later, the woman reported that she had been raped. Now the Obama administration is riding to the rescue of “sexual assault” victims. It vows to excavate equities from the ambiguities of the hookup culture, this cocktail of hormones, alcohol and the faux sophistication of today’s prolonged adolescence of especially privileged young adults.

The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20 percent.”

Outrage! George Will did the math!

Where is the outrage in a recognition that the leftist’s numbers don’t add up? This is simply free speech in making a counterpoint to a leftist misrepresentation. But no, making counterpoints are not allowed. Counterpoints to leftist arguments must be demonized and censored, so as to be eliminated from the conversation. No debate, the left wins the argument, because there is no argument.

The Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt defended Will in a statement, saying his comments were “well within the bounds of legitimate debate”. Surprising from the leftist Washington Post, but still a welcomed bit of journalistic good judgement.