The mere possibility that the editor of a prestigious intellectual journal resigned under pressure from advertisers would normally provoke widespread attention and concern from mainstream publications––especially upon confirmation that a major advertiser issued a complaint––given the implications for journalistic independence.

If “resigned due to factual errors” is the best-case scenario, from the perspective of the health of journalism going forward, “resigned to placate advertisers” is among the worst. The NYRB’s journalistic mission will suffer insofar as its editors are under the impression, whether mistaken or accurate, that they cannot cross the university presses.

Yet that aspect of the story has been absent from much of the coverage, even at outlets such as the Columbia Journalism Review, where one would most expect it. CJR instead focused on this question: When should it be verboten to publish essays from men who’ve been accused of sexual misconduct?

Buruma articulated one approach. He believed that it would be worth it for NYRB readers to read a first person account of what it was like “to be, as it were, at the top of the world, doing more or less what you like, being a jerk in many ways, and then finding your life ruined and being a public villain and pilloried,” not necessarily “as a defense of what he may have done,” but as “an angle on an issue that is clearly very important.”

He characterized that angle as relatively unexplored, adding that we ought to be thinking about “what should happen in cases like his, where you have been legally acquitted but you are still judged as undesirable in public opinion, and how far that should go, how long that should last, and whether people should or can make a comeback at all.”

He added:

The reason I was interested in publishing it is precisely to help people think this sort of thing through. I am not talking about people who broke the law. I am not talking about rapists. I am talking about people who behaved badly sexually, abusing their power in one way or another, and then the question is how should that be sanctioned. Something like rape is a crime, and we know what happens in the case of crimes. There are trials and if you are held to be guilty or convicted and so on, there are rules about that. What is much murkier is when people are not found to have broken the law but have misbehaved in other ways nonetheless. How do you deal with such cases? Should that last forever?

I confess that I have no good answer to the questions he wants me to ponder. I have no idea what exactly we ought to do with Ghomeshi. I do know those standards, articulated in Buruma’s much-maligned interview with Isaac Chotiner, are typical for an editor. Will an essay present readers with a relatively unfamiliar angle on a subject of importance? Will it draw them into new or deeper engagement with hard questions?