The Journalistic Implications of Ian Buruma’s Resignation

Last week, Ian Buruma resigned his post as editor at The New York Review of Books amid controversy over an essay that he commissioned and ran. That essay, “Reflections From a Hashtag,” was a first-person account by the former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation host Jian Ghomeshi of being fired amid allegations of violent sexual misconduct and then acquitted of most of the criminal charges by a Canadian court.

It is unusual for a well-regarded editor at a prestigious intellectual journal to lose a leadership position over just one article. What are the larger implications for American journalism?

More specifically:

• What exactly prompted the resignation?
• When should it be verboten to publish men accused of sexual misconduct?
• How will the resignation affect mainstream-media publications and the work they decide to commission and publish going forward?

In the controversial NYRB essay, Ghomeshi began with a brief account of the allegations against him. He was permitted to offer this one:

In October 2014, I was fired from my job at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after allegations circulated online that I’d been abusive with an ex-girlfriend during sex. In the aftermath of my firing, and amid a media storm, several more people accused me of sexual misconduct. I faced criminal charges including hair-pulling, hitting during intimacy in one instance, and—the most serious allegation—nonconsensual choking while making out with a woman on a date in 2002. I pleaded not guilty. Several months later, after a very public trial, I was cleared on all counts. One of the charges was separated and later withdrawn with a peace bond—a pledge to be on good behavior for a year. There was no criminal trial.

Does that passage meet adequate standards of accuracy?

The known facts of the matter are complicated enough that I find myself unable to convey them satisfactorily in the space of a single paragraph.

[What magazines can’t do in the era of #MeToo]

The earliest on the matter in the cited three accusers alleging nonconsensual violence during sex and a fourth alleging a sexually aggressive comment at work. Canadian authorities ultimately with criminally assaulting six women; more than a dozen others alleged related improprieties. Last March, a court acquitted him of all criminal charges save one––the final charge “was withdrawn on two conditions,” notes Jesse Brown, a journalist who covered the matter. “One was that he enter into a peace bond, and the other was that he deliver a to his victim, Kathryn Borel.”