Campus Protesters Were Right to Spurn Peggy Noonan, Emblem of Media Obtuseness

Instead, Noonan, who by her own account didn’t have any conversation of more than a few seconds with any students, offered amateur psychoanalysis. Writing of students in the second person, she insisted, “Critical thinking isn’t your strong suit, emotion is.” This, mind you, is a writer who believes God Almighty deputizes dolphins with angelic duties in order to rescue a young boy (but apparently not his mother) from godless communism. Noonan added, “They see themselves as indignant, sincere and uniquely vulnerable. They looked to me more cosseted and indulged.” She also insisted, “They weren’t a compassionate group.” She spoke of Hamilton Hall being “liberated” by the police.

Noonan asked why the students wore masks, and then for once gave room to their perfectly reasonable explanation (“that, as technological sophisticates, they wish to avoid facial-recognition software; that they wish not to limit their future prospects, including employment opportunities”). Then, again without any evidence, she says this isn’t the true reason. The students are hiding their faces because they are “cowards.” Noonan doesn’t even address the fact that the students’ explanation for their conduct is firmly fact-based: Conservative pundits and business leaders have called for a boycott of Columbia graduates, an attempt to return the United States to the era of McCarthyism and blacklists.

Peggy Noonan is a stellar avatar of mainstream media obtuseness and narcissism. She has no awareness of how her lordly domination of the discourse prevents an honest engagement with critics—or even a sense of why ordinary people are rightly suspicious that she and her ilk are going to present a distorted picture of the world.

But Noonan isn’t alone. It’s striking that a number of other prominent voices shared her wounded amour propre, her anger at the students who, with justice, didn’t want to serve as grist for her right-wing mill. Peter Baker of The New York Times posted a screenshot of Noonan’s column with this commentary: “When protests are not about actually explaining your cause or trying to engage journalists who are there to listen.” Does any serious person think that Noonan was at Columbia “to listen”? Is Baker not aware of the many persuasive critiques of his own newspaper for its anti-Palestinian bias? Can he not conceive of a reason why pro-Palestinian protesters might not want to talk to a former Reagan speechwriter who has spent decades writing frothing right-wing commentary and who works for the most reactionary major newspaper in the United States?

Ben Smith, editor in chief of Semafor, weighed in on the debate by writing, “As is often the case, the young people are mimicking an older kind of message discipline that doesn’t work any more, while the old men (Biden and Trump) post away and gab with Howard Stern in a post-gaffe world.”

Michael Powell of The Atlantic had earlier written his own account of the Columbus protest that made the same point as Noonan. “As I toured the liberated zone,” Powell complained, “I found most protesters distinctly nonliberated when it came to talking with a reporter.” Powell did speak to “Layla Saliba, a social-work graduate student who served as a spokesperson for the protest. A Palestinian American, she said she has lost family in the fighting in Gaza.”

It’s bizarre to pretend that student protesters exist in the same discursive space as presidents. Biden and Trump can get away with massive gaffes (and even outright lies) because they are supported by an army of partisans who have developed motivated reasoning skills that allow them forgive any verbal misstep. Student protests, by contrast, are under the gun of a hostile media culture that is ready to pounce on any sloppy rhetoric as way to discredit and marginalize their movements.

Salibia responded by politely noting that Powell had misrepresented what she said:

I enjoyed speaking to you but reading this article was disappointing. I spoke to you about how my Palestinian Christian family members were bombed, they were not involved in any fighting. Many Palestinian students at Columbia have lost family.

Powell continues to insist, “It is baffling that protesters don’t want to engage and to my view a strategic error. But of course they are under no obligation, [a]nd it is up to us to find ways around it.” It’s worth noting that the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, is a former IDF prison guard. Is it really so baffling that students don’t trust Powell or the magazine he works for?

The student protesters, not just at Columbia but on hundreds of other campuses, have been showing an admirable message discipline. There’s absolutely no need for random students to talk to the Peggy Noonans of the world. Rather, Noonan and her media peers should ask themselves how they’ve earned the distrust of an entire generation of young people. The real question is: Why would any reasonable person talk to Noonan?