Free Speech & William D. Cohan

Author William D. Cohan’s first written comments on the Duke case came in an unusual forum—a CNN column bizarrely arguing for lowering the national drinking age to 19 years old. Cohan’s proposal would have left the strongest moral arguments against the current policy—that if you can die for your country, you should be able to buy a beer—in place, perhaps explaining why not a single state is considering the idea. But the column seemed designed not to influence public policy but instead to give Cohan an opportunity to launch character attacks against the lacrosse players. Of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of instances of excessive drinking on campus in the past decade, Cohan focused on the lacrosse party.

Having departed Bloomberg View for the Huffington Post, Cohan used his inaugural HuffPost column to again ostensibly comment on a policy issue but mostly to discuss The Price of Silence. The column’s arresting title: “How Much Freedom of Speech Is Too Much?”

Cohan offered three examples of an allegedly disturbing trend of excessive free speech. One was a lawsuit from Virginia, involving allegedly defamatory statements made about the work of a contractor. The second was a lawsuit from Oregon, involving allegedly defamatory statements made about the work of a contractor. The third was the fate of “authors whose books appear for sale on Amazon and then quickly get reviewed by an increasingly large army of people who seem to have nothing better to do with their time.” It appears as if Cohan’s chief interest is the fate of one author in particular: William D. Cohan. He mentions no other Amazon author in his column.

For those interested in logic puzzles, one of the three examples in Cohan’s column is unlike the other two.

Having earlier floated a conspiracy of defense attorneys, the State Bar, the AG’s office, and unnamed Northeastern lawyers to explain the exoneration, Cohan is now reduced to alleging a “well-organized” conspiracy (of unidentified individuals, led by unidentified parties) of “haters” (a favorite Cohan term!) to “poison the well” regarding what one commentator has termed a “tightly wound 621 pages devoted to a balanced assessment of a complex event.”

(That commentator, by the way, was William D. Cohan, practicing the kind of speech that author William D. Cohan seems to very much like.)

Cohan’s central claim in the column is that people who hadn’t read his book gave it negative reviews. Given that one of his five-starreviewers outright admitted not reading the book, and several others either described a book that didn’t exist or didn’t mention Cohan’s arguments at all, Cohan’s complaint seems one-sided. His concern seems to be less “instant, unvetted and unfiltered commentary” than “instant, unvetted and unfiltered commentary” that doesn’t say the sort of things that William D. Cohan wants said.

Indeed, Cohan has complained about the “speech” of critical reviewers before; in his New York interview, he fumed about the New Republic and Commentary turning to Stuart and me to review his book. In a Facebook comment, he falsely suggested that Joe Neff hadn’t read the book before writing about it. He’s been silent or praiseworthy, on the other hand, regarding positive commentaries (Economist, Newsday) from reviewers who took away from the book items that the book didn’t actually include.

It’s hard to imagine any neutral readers will come away from Cohan’s column jumping on the anti-free speech bandwagon. The author, in any event, comes across as obsessed with Amazon—the column is at least the third time he’s complained about the site’s reviews, even as many of the negative reviews are quite detailed and clearly come from people who are engaging with his book’s claims. In a surprising tactical move, he even confesses to having contacted Amazon, to inquire about an unspecified number of negative reviews (or what he deems “clearly biased reviews”) being taken down. He gives no indication of having demanded that Amazon remove positive reviews from people who admitted not having read the book. Amazon unsurprisingly rebuffed Cohan’s complaint.

In the end, though, Cohan perhaps unintentionally reveals his chief concern. The reviews, he laments, show that “the market’s verdict has been rendered: this is a two-star book, not worthy of a moment’s consideration.”