And the Guardian Weighs In

[Content Note: Choice policing; terminal illness; disablism.]

Part One: Emma Keller writes a terrible piece for the Guardian ostensibly pondering "the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness," which is really just a bunch of rank policing of Lisa Bonchek Adams' choices surrounding her sharing her lived experiences with cancer on social media.

Part Two: Emma Keller's husband, Bill Keller, writes a terrible piece for the New York Times, which is more of the same reprehensible garbage.

Part Three: The New York Times Public Editor responds with some weak sauce, and Bill Keller doubles-down on being a total nightmare.

And thus we come to Part Four, in which the Guardian's Chris Elliott explains: "Why an article on Lisa Bonchek Adams was removed from the Guardian site."

The subtitle pretty much says it all: "I don't think it is wrong to frame a question about how those with incurable illnesses use social media, but the Guardian was wrong in the way it went about it."

I mean, basically, if you don't think it's wrong to police how people use social media to talk about their own lives, then we're pretty much done here.

Although I do want to highlight this bit of fuckery:

One of the many difficulties in trying to resolve the complaint is that the complainant is undergoing painful treatment. While she has continued to tweet from hospital, she has made clear in the two emails the Guardian has received from her that she does not feel she should have to take time from her treatment to engage with the process of correcting what she believes is wrong in the piece. I entirely understand and respect her position.

Really? Are you sure you entirely respect her position? Because I'm pretty sure you just implicitly accused her of either lying or having shitty priorities, by noting she is continuing to tweet from the hospital but isn't sending you detailed information about what Emma Keller got wrong in her contemptible piece.

And in case it wasn't clear enough the first time:

I have written to Adams to suggest we put up a fresh piece dealing with all her issues when she is able to engage with us, and to offer to publish a response entirely from her point of view. However, it is only right that this should be in her own time and that she should be allowed to get on with her treatment without any pressures. Therefore I do not anticipate that I will have fully resolved all issues for some time, and I think that we should not restore Keller's original article to our website until I can do so.

How magnanimous. You know, that might have seemed a lot more compassionate if Elliott hadn't noted several paragraphs earlier that Lisa Bonchek Adams "has continued to tweet from hospital."

Essentially, this piece is just a replay of the original objections: The public shaming and auditing of how Lisa Bonchek Adams spends her time and energy.

This time, with an added dose of tasking her with the responsibility for Emma Keller's original piece still being removed from the site.

That is an extraordinary deflection of accountability for publishing and subsequently removing Keller's piece. Disgraceful.