JEFFREY TOOBIN AND THE MEDIA’S CURIOUS CODE OF DECENCY:

In 2008, Toobin had an affair with Casey Greenfield, the much-younger daughter of veteran political journalist Jeff Greenfield. When Casey Greenfield became pregnant, Toobin reportedly offered her money to have an abortion. When she refused, he told her he would make her regret the decision. After the child was born, Toobin had to be dragged into court and forced to pay child support.

Yet, according to some of his notable colleagues, the real problem here is judgmental prudes. One of Toobin’s New Yorker colleagues, trans activist Masha Gessen, dismissed the incident. “I think it’s tragic that a guy would get fired for really just doing something really stupid,” Gessen told the Times. “It is the Zoom equivalent of taking an inappropriately long lunch break, having sex during it and getting stumbled upon.”

Another New Yorker writer, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, told the Times “the only way I could explain [Toobin’s firing] … was that Condé Nast had taken an unexpected turn toward traditional Catholic teaching.” To drive the point home, “Mr. Gladwell then took out his Bible and read to a reporter an allegory from Genesis 38 in which God strikes down a man for succumbing to the sin of self-gratification.”

Gladwell’s superficial understanding of Scripture might be a surprise to readers of his thought-provoking books and, in any event, was a weak attempt to cast doubt on the idea Toobin violated agreed-upon standards of decency. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine there are many jobs in secular America, let alone in vocations heavily dependent on public credibility, where you can turn into Onan the Barbarian in front of dozens of colleagues and still collect a six-figure salary.

In general, excusing libertine elites such as Toobin raises uncomfortable questions for the media. Do black lives matter when 70% of African American children are born out of wedlock? What about the fact that 36% of abortions are performed on African Americans even though they represent 13% of the population – doesn’t that inequality reflect some kind of institutional racism? Don’t expect any serious consideration of these issues coming to an op-ed page near you soon.

Remember #MeToo? It seems so long ago. As Dan McLaughlin wrote in October, “What should shock us is that Toobin has yet to be fired [the New Yorker finally announced Toobin was gone in mid-November, and CNN’s management apparently still haven’t made up their minds yet — Ed], when nearly anyone else would be — any ordinary person, and almost any prominent person whose politics were different from Toobin’s. Instead, it took over a week for anyone to even disclose that he had been disciplined at all. This is perhaps not a great sign regarding how much the media have learned since Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, or Mark Halperin. This is by no means the first indication of Toobin’s horrible, abusive sexual morals.”