Campus journalism fracas reaches the New York Times

We’ve heard lately about the problems that college students are having with their campus newspapers. In one case, Harvard students criticized their paper, The Crimson, because it asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for a comment after an anti-ICE demonstration.This request, so the critics claimed, endangered undocumented students. It didn’t: none were named. The paper published an op-ed instructing students that the paper acted properly, which it did. The students weren’t placated, for as the New York Times reported yesterday:

While The Crimson’s top editors have stood their ground, Act on a Dream and others have posted an online petition demanding that the paper apologize for “the harm they inflicted on the undocumented community” and that it change its policies. The groups have said they will boycott The Crimson by declining any interview requests until the paper changes its practices.

Those signing the petition included the Harvard College Democrats; the Phillips Brooks House Association, Harvard’s largest community service organization; and several groups representing Latino and black students.

The debate has reached the student government, which voted narrowly to issue a statement criticizing The Crimson and expressing solidarity with Act on a Dream.

The Harvard College Democrats? Oy, that stings!

In the other case, the Daily Northwestern of the eponymous university removed photographs of students protesting Jeff Sessions’ visit to campus, apologized to the students for contactingthem for comments by sending text messages on numbers taken from the campus directory (this was construed as an “invasion of privacy”), removed the name of a student who had been quoted in the paper, and, finally, groveled shamelessly, crying how sorry the paper was for traumatizing students and causing them “harm”—all by simple and normal reporting.

These issues (you heard it here first!) have finally reached America’s premier newspaper, which names the kind of reporting done by the Crimson and Daily Northwestern as “trauma porn”, so called by one student who had been photographed by on the ground by a DN photographer after an altercation with police.

If you’ve followed the coverage here, there’s not much new to learn, but we’re starting to see the outline of how college students intend to change journalism when (or if) they grow up. Their main intent, of course, is to abandon objectivity and turn journalism into another venue for social engineering. Here are a few quotes from the article:

Note that the Left is the group trying to change things here, though of course the Right has had its own beefs with the press, most notably with Trump’s repeated denigration of mainstream media as purveyors of “fake news”. But Trump hasn’t changed the mainstream press, while Left-wing students are already doing so as their older peers, now professional journalists, are turning venues like the New York Times into instruments of social justice. Doing that in editorials in fine, but in news—not so much.

Olander’s dilemma has a simple solution: just keep on “upholding widely accepted standards of journalism.” There is no compromise possible between catering to woke students and maintaining journalistic standards. We all know that this is true. If you feed the beast, it only gets hungrier, and is never full.

More:

Greta Bjornson, who worked last academic year as the editor of The Vermont Cynic, a student newspaper at the University of Vermont, said that student activists sometimes raised valid points about a lack of diversity on the newspaper staff. Other times, she said, they would ask to change a headline after publication, or would decline to talk to reporters.

“It’s just changing so quickly,” said Ms. Bjornson, 22. “I think it’s just a tricky time, especially to be a student journalist. No matter what you do, I feel like you’re going to make somebody angry.”

 

By all means make your newspaper staff diverse, as that’s desirable, but there’s no need to change headlines unless you’ve written something biased or inacurate. If you cater to every student who wants to act like an editor, you will not produce news, but rather the equivalent of a consensus of social media. In other words, you’ll turn your paper into HuffPost. As for getting somebody angry, well, that comes with the job, and would-be journalists must learn to live with it. There’s not a newspaper in America that hasn’t pissed off a large number of people. (See the bottom of this post for the response of another editor whose work has angered students.)

The NYT piece continues:

Troy Closson, the editor in chief of The Daily Northwestern, wrote on Twitter that he felt added pressure as only the third African-American student to hold the top position at the paper in its more than 135-year history. “Being in this role and balancing our coverage and the role of this paper on campus with my racial identity — and knowing how our paper has historically failed students of color, and particularly black students, has been incredibly challenging to navigate,” he wrote.

If the paper has historically failed people of color, the way to rectify that is to change what is covered, and write more op-eds. But I don’t sympathize much with Closson’s racial excuse, for his paper simply failed to adhere to normal journalistic practices, and its apology was cringe-making. There was no need to drag race into the situation.

The student who coined “trauma porn” also had a say:

In a coffee shop in Evanston on Tuesday, Ms. [Ying] Dai, 23, the student who had questioned Mr. Boyle’s photograph of her, said that she and other activists were trying to challenge journalistic norms and push for a more sensitive approach to reporting that considers the vulnerability of the people whose lives are portrayed.

“We weren’t there to get in the newspaper,” she said of the protest at the Sessions event. “We weren’t there to get national attention. People still hold dear that their journalistic duty is the most important thing, and that’s not the case.”

Wrong. Does Ms. Dai really feel that the coverage of news must be tailored to the degree of oppression of the group covered? Sure, it’s fine to have a series about the lives of the oppressed, like the NYT’s series on “How Race is Lived in America,” but I cannot imagine exactly how the Woke want journalism tweaked toward their interests. Was the Northwestern Daily not supposed to ask students for quotes, or take pictures of the demonstration, which occurred in a public place? If not, then how are people supposed to learn and see what happened? Imagine if the mainstream news had refrained from showing videos and pictures of African-Americans in the Sixties downed by fire hoses and police dogs!

There’s more:

. . . there has been dissent within The Crimson. Danu Mudannayake, 21, a senior who is an illustrator at the paper, said in an interview, “We just internally want to see more done to address the concerns on campus and not uphold this quite cold front that ‘We are a newspaper at the end of the day, and that is before anything else.’”

She suggested that the era called for a different kind of journalism, particularly for student journalists.

“We can still be serious student journalists, but still have more empathy,” she said. “I think the question of empathetic journalism is, at least for us on the inside, what’s at the heart of it.”

I’m not sure what “more empathy” means, except to report on people differentially depending on their race, gender, ethnicity, or perceived degree of oppression. That kind of empathy belongs not in the news, but in the op-ed section.

All of this happening at once worries me, for it presages a change in mainstream journalism as these students move into regular non-student newspapers and television. A free press, with an emphasis on objectivity in reporting, has been an important mainstay of American democracy. If news coverage is biased or slanted towards a certain ideology, that removes some objectivity, for people cannot truly learn what is going on if the news is designed to be “empathic” in a certain way. We can see what this would lead to by reading truly ideological sites like Breitbart or HuffPost. You can’t learn what’s really happening when “reporters” present only one side of an issue. And American democracy, imperfect as it is, requires that its citizens learn and see what is happening.

In fact, the only heartening thing in the NYT piece (besides the report on the Crimson‘s refusal to cower before Harvard students), are the thoughts of one college newspaper editor in Wisconsin: