I agree that these scenarios are different. But I also think there isn't a clear binary here, nor even a spectrum between two poles (e.g., speaking to audiences that range from small to large), but an infinity of situations along different layers and dimensions.
The art of memoir teaches the expression of feelings as well as ideas, and memoir is often designed to be absorbed by relatively small audiences of readers. Furthermore, in a workshop with (for example) only five students, those students have an opportunity to get to know each other well. There's time for them to accommodate each other's particular quirks as a matter of courtesy, even if it never rises to the level of real understanding and friendship.
Journalism focuses on obtaining and presenting information about the world, often for mass audiences, and in a lecture hall of five hundred students, inevitably someone's words will confuse, annoy, or offend someone else. It'll be hard for everyone to accommodate everyone else's feelings while also striving to communicate facts. However, that doesn't mean the journalist/speaker/writer shouldn't try to be thoughtful and kind in ways that are appropriate to the art and science of journalism. It's important to exchange ideas, but that doesn't mean (for example) debating the validity or existence of a minority group, especially when members of that group are right there in the room with us. We can have a conversation with our classmates about any other topic, and--implicitly, gradually, as a bonus--we'll also learn about the identity of the person we're talking with, and then we'll no longer see any logic in aggressively challenging their identity. Those are our colleagues and friends; their identity is plainly real to us. If we have a genuine question about their identity, we can think of a respectful way to ask it, and they'll observe that the question comes from a place of respect.
What I mean is that we can ask the meta-question of what ideas we ought to exchange. The ideas we want to discuss, and how we discuss them, can be aware of and responsive to the people we're talking to and the contexts we're in, whether it's one coworker or a thousand students.
Purity isn't the goal, and the impossibility of purity doesn't let us off the hook. We can always try to be less harmful, and there is always room for improvement. We can learn about identities, experiences, and perspectives we didn't know existed, and we can get better at crafting messages that work for personal conversation as well as for large, diverse audiences.
My problem with Thoraval's article was that he asked for greater tolerance for speakers (especially himself as a teacher) and less tolerance for listeners (i.e., his students -- because his discomfort matters, but he doesn't intend to fully reciprocate the care). He wants students to look beyond his actual words and assume that he means well, yet he isn't willing to give his students' interior lives the same benefit of the doubt (e.g., if a student flees the classroom without giving a reason, he doesn't seem to want to believe that they have a reason, let alone does he try to figure out what it is). So he's framing tolerance as a zero-sum game. As if tolerance were a scarce resource and there were a limited number of slices of pie. That framing seems unnecessary to me. Listeners can extend patience and tolerance to speakers, especially if the speakers earn trust by demonstrating that they mean well even when they misstep and that they are trying to improve. Simultaneously, speakers can take their listeners seriously and try to respect them as people, even when respect is complicated or seems like a balancing act between different beliefs or agendas. If we do both of those things at the same time--speakers and listeners genuinely caring about each other and working together in an always-room-for-improvement kind of way--the pie gets bigger and more people can be heard in more ways, and then there is a healthy, functional context in which to exchange ideas. But if we say, Oh, those people are overly sensitive for no reason and I'm not going to change my ways because it's too much work for me, that's giving up, and we are choosing to limit the kinds of people we can talk to and the kinds of conversations we can have. Then there will be less respect to go around because we have diminished it. It can't grow. There will be less communication, less understanding, and less knowledge.
