Category: media

bookmark_borderNo need for journalists to apologize for being journalists

Posted on by Marissa

I began this post a while ago and did not have a chance to finish it until now, so it’s a bit out of date. Despite this, I am still going to weigh in with my thoughts on a controversy in which student journalists at Northwestern University apologized for… practicing journalism.

This situation arose when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited campus, and many students decided to protest. Some of the protesters voiced their opinions peacefully, while others decided to climb through the windows of the lecture hall and forcibly push their way inside to disrupt Sessions’ speech. Two student reporters with the Daily Northwestern had the audacity to interview people in the crowd outside. Afterwards they also used a school directory to look up phone numbers of students involved in the protest and ask them if they would be willing to be interviewed. Additionally, during the protest, a student photographer took pictures of the clash between protesters and police and posted these to Twitter.

“I snapped into the journalistic response of making images,” the photographer, Colin Boyle, explained. “I was just trying to tell the story of what was going on… If something happened, God forbid, I was the only camera that was non-police-owned in that area, to my knowledge.”

Sounds reasonable to me.

However, student activists quickly began making a brouhaha, complaining that the publication of their names and identities might enable the university to punish them for their actions. As a result, the paper redacted a protester’s name from their story and Boyle deleted any tweets with photos showing protesters’ faces.

The Daily Northwestern‘s editorial board apologized in an editorial, which read,

We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced, and we wanted to apologize for and address the mistakes that we made that night. Some protesters found photos posted to reporters’ Twitter accounts retraumatizing and invasive. Those photos have since been taken down.

In my opinion, the newspaper has absolutely nothing to apologize for. They made no mistakes by covering the protest; the true mistake was to take down the content and to apologize.

When someone chooses to participate in a public protest, they are protesting, well, publicly. And integral part of participating in a protest is the fact that you are in public, and therefore will be seen and potentially photographed by people. It makes no sense for a protester to object to being photographed. If anything, protesters should want as much media coverage as possible, since drawing attention to one’s message and cause is the main purpose of a protest.

Additionally, the students who disrupted Sessions’ speech deserve to be punished, and anything that makes it easier for them to be identified and held accountable for their actions is a good thing, not a bad thing. Disrupting a speech is not OK. It is not fair to the speaker or to the people who have come to hear the speech. For a mob of people to drown out the views of a person with whom they disagree is bullying.

Contrary to the words used in the Daily‘s editorial, the anti-Sessions protesters did not experience any harm as far as I can tell, nor were they traumatized. How is it traumatizing that a person with whom you disagree is giving a speech? How does it cause harm? Anyone who did not wish to hear Sessions’ words could simply have chosen not to attend his speech. If anyone was harmed or traumatized, it would be Sessions and the people who went to the lecture hall hoping to hear him speak. The protesters went out of their way to cause a conflict. They are the aggressors in this situation, not the ones traumatized or harmed. They do not have a right to avoid punishment for their actions, and the newspaper and its reporters should not have modified, redacted, or taken down any of their reporting to accommodate them.

bookmark_borderAl-Baghdadi obituary: the Washington Post did nothing wrong

Posted on by Marissa

The Washington Post received a lot of criticism recently for its coverage of the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The newspaper’s headline read:

“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.”

Many people, including Ivanka Trump, believed that this headline was too positive for the leader of a violent organization and that the term “terrorist” would have been more appropriate than “austere religious scholar.”

The headline was quickly changed, and an editor at the Post explained that the original headline never should have been published.

There wouldn’t be anything wrong with using the word “terrorist,” but there was nothing wrong with the Post’s choice of headline, either, and there was no need to change it. The headline captures the fact that al-Baghdadi died, the fact that he had fundamentalist religious beliefs, and the fact that he was the leader of ISIS. “Austere religious scholar” is a neutral, and factually accurate, description. It is not a compliment, nor it is an insult. It is neither positive or negative. And using neutral language is exactly what all newspapers should do.

Columnist Robert Roe at the Maysville Ledger Independent took issue with the fact that the Post published the story about al-Baghdadi’s death in the obituaries section, writing that the paper’s editors “mislead their readers with the false narrative that this animal was something akin to a diplomatic religious leader.” I’m not sure what is wrong with publishing al-Baghdadi’s death notice in the obituaries section. There’s no rule that only admirable people are allowed to have obituaries written about them. Just as newspapers should describe things using neutral language and allow readers to form their own opinions, they should also publish obituaries for a variety of public figures and allow readers to make their own judgments about which of these public figures they find admirable and which they do not.

Jesse White, a columnist at the Mesabi Daily News, went so far as to suggest that the headline should have read, “Noted scumbag, rapist, torture expert, all-around piece of [expletive] and now former ISIS leader is dead: Good riddance.” He added that a sub-heading should have told readers that al-Baghdadi “blew himself up (along with three of his kids) instead of taking a bullet to the head from a member of our special forces on Saturday because he was a psychopathic coward.”

This type of language is a perfect example of what a newspaper should not do. A newspaper should never, under any circumstances, describe a person as a “scumbag,” a “coward,” or a “piece of [expletive]’ in an article. Other than on the editorial page, the job of a newspaper is to provide facts, not opinions. Language like this is not merely opinion, it is inflammatory and personally insulting. It would be completely unprofessional and inappropriate for a newspaper article to describe a person in such insulting terms, no matter who the person is, and it is preposterous to suggest that a newspaper should do so.

No concerns about neutrality or professionalism stopped the Boston Herald from characterizing al-Baghdadi’s death as “taking out the trash” on its front page:

A newspaper should never describe anyone’s death as “taking out the trash,” no matter what horrible things the person did and no matter how widely hated the person is. Hatred for a person, whether justified or not, is an opinion, and newspapers should not express opinions (other than on the editorial page). It’s the Herald’s headline, not the Washington Post’s, that should be the target of outrage and criticism.