STOCKBRIDGE — Roughly two months ago, a school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, voted unanimously to remove the two-volume graphic Holocaust novel “Maus” from its schools’ curriculum over concerns about “rough, objectionable language” and a drawing of a nude woman.
Written by cartoonist and editor Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus” depicts the author interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor.
In taking the action, the McMinn County school board seemed oblivious to the so-called Streisand Effect, in which the suppression of controversial material backfires and instead spawns an intense interest that would otherwise not have occurred.
A public library was the fitting venue for a discussion of book banning, as two distinguished authorities on publishing led a dialogue Saturday at the Stockbridge Library Museum & Archives.
André Bernard, a veteran publisher and vice president of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, led the discussion that also featured special guest Martin “Marty” Baron, the newly retired journalist who, most recently, led the newsrooms of the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. Bernard used the banning of “Maus” as a jumping off point for a discussion of free speech that veered eventually into journalism.
Baron-led newsrooms have won a total of 17 Pulitzer Prizes, including — perhaps most famously — one for the Globe’s investigation into the concealment by the Catholic Church of the priestly sex abuse of young people in the Boston area, later portrayed in the Academy Award-winning film “Spotlight.” As executive editor of the Miami Herald, Baron’s newsroom also won a Pulitzer for coverage of Elián González, the Cuban boy who was the focus of a fierce immigration and custody dispute in South Florida.
Bernard asked Baron why he thought the school board had banned “Maus,” to which Baron replied: “The stated reasons were the violence, the nudity, the profanity, suicide — all of that. But the question is what was the real reason? Spiegelman, when he was asked about it, said, ‘Well, I guess they would like to have a nicer Holocaust.'”
Baron further pointed out that the arguments against “Maus” — nudity, violence, and suicide — could “apply … to so many other things.” The nudity alone could prove impractical.
“What are we going to do?” he asked rhetorically. “Not have students go into art museums and see Gauguin, Degas, and Rousseau — and all these great artists of history — because there’s nudity?”
And so it went.
As Wendy Pearson, who heads the Stockbridge Library, pointed out in her introduction, book banning is nothing new … “But as the culture wars grow ever more strident and aggressive, libraries, schools and even bookstores are under increasing pressure to strip their shelves of material tagged as subversive, obscene or otherwise offensive.”
Bernard spoke of the utter futility of banning books when so much information about them is available online anyway. That’s especially true for children. After all, the Harry Potter novels and “Charlotte’s Web” have been banned in some jurisdictions.
“If you pull a book from the school library, a kid is likely to look it up on his phone more than they are going to go to a school library,” Bernard added.
Baron said the issue is larger than banning books. He pointed to the recent efforts of newly elected Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia to bar teachers from teaching “discriminatory and divisive concepts” in the state’s public education system.
“The history of the country is filled with divisive concepts, going back to the founding of the country, the Civil War, slavery,” Baron said. “The issue is bigger than books.”
The discussion then transitioned to a debate on “cancel culture,” a form of ostracism stemming from one’s political views or personal preferences. The term is typically used by those on the right who object, for example, to student uprisings on college campuses when conservatives are invited to speak.
But, as the efforts of conservative politicians to ban books and former President Donald Trump’s calls to boycott companies such as AT&T and Amazon clearly demonstrate, “cancel culture” is hardly a partisan tactic (AT&T owned CNN at the time and Amazon President Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post).
“Republicans seem to be the ones doing the most canceling at the moment,” Baron surmised.
It was a perfect segue to a discussion of a New York Times editorial from last week, “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” in which the paper’s editorial board inveighed against what it called “social silencing” and the “destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture.”
The editorial came under intense criticism from those on the left, including journalist and professor Jeff Jarvis, who, in a series of tweets, excoriated the paper for drawing a false equivalency between “book burning” and “criticizing hate.”
But those on the right, including the conservative magazine Reason, lauded the piece, largely on the grounds that “the editorial reads like it could have been written by someone who works at Reason.”
Baron took issue with the lead paragraph, which labeled as “fundamental” the right of Americans “to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.” In fact, no such right exists.
“It’s true that Americans have a right to their opinions, but they don’t necessarily have a right not to be shamed or shunned,” Baron said, adding that he was surprised that a paper with the resources of The Times could have published an editorial whose lede was so flawed.
“The bigger issue is whether the shaming and the shunning have gotten out of hand and whether it’s caused people to feel that they cannot really express themselves on controversial issues and I think that is actually the truth,” Baron observed, clearly indicating that he agreed with much of the rest of the editorial.
And in a note of supreme irony, Baron added, “As best I can tell … the people who object to the editorial are the people who like to do the shaming and shunning.”
Baron was asked about the future of journalism in the digital age and where he sees it going. He thinks it’s unlikely there will be many print newspapers — or print publications in general, for that matter — 10 years from now.
When he first became editor of the Miami Herald in 2000, Baron, now 67, said the internet existed but few people used it, in part because broadband speeds had low penetration rates in those days. Now stories come at breakneck speed, “you’re learning things on the fly” and “producing stories minute-by-minute.”
One controversy that could be considered a clash of cultures that enveloped Baron at The Post concerned a young reporter who posted a controversial tweet about the death of basketball superstar Kobe Bryant. Baron suspended the reporter, Felicia Sonmez, but after her union criticized the move, she was reinstated.
“I wanted us to adhere to our strict standards on social media and news reporters not expressing individual opinions. These days younger journalists seem to feel they have a right to self expression, notwithstanding their jobs as news reporters. I don’t agree with that.”
“If you want to be an advocate, be an advocate,” Baron continued. “If you want to be an activist, be an activist. If you want to be a politician, then be a politician. But if you chose to be a news reporter, act like one.”
The conversation didn’t end there. After the talk, Baron, who owns a home in Stockbridge, stayed around to answer questions from individuals, some in the public forum and others privately after the crowd of 100 or so dispersed.
