Now, and from now on, journalists are going to be participants in a far more argumentative sphere than anything anyone alive has ever seen. The question for us is not whether we want this increase in argumentation — no one is asking us, and there is, in fact, no one who could ask us — but rather how we adapt ourselves to it as it unfolds. And the two tools we’re most practiced at using — scarcity of public speech, and force applied to defectors from mainstream consensus — are getting less viable every day.
