In college newspapers, citizens are getting a glimpse of what they can expect in the future.
In June, dozens of New York Times reporters staged a social-media revolt over an article written by Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton in which he argued for a federal role in controlling violent riots that had erupted across America. Running the column “puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” tweeted the staff members — a protest that eventually led to opinion editor James Bennet’s offering his resignation.
This woke takeover of newsrooms was entirely predictable, as many of today’s reporters and editors are entering journalism after being steeped in progressive values at their campus papers and supported by leftist administrators.
In fact, the idea that merely printing a Republican viewpoint is offensive is a common one on campus, where words and photos are now often ascribed the same power as violence. For instance, late last year, editors at the Northwestern campus paper actually apologized for sending a photographer to take pictures of a protest that took place during a campus visit by former U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions. “We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced,” the paper’s editors wrote, explaining that some of the protesters found pictures of the event “retraumatizing and invasive.”
“While our goal is to document history and spread information, nothing is more important than ensuring that our fellow students feel safe. . . . We failed to do that last week, and we could not be more sorry,” the apology continued.
In February 2018, Ethan Brady, the editor of the Middlebury Campus, explained the paper’s decision to run a photo of political scientist Charles Murray, given that seeing the photo “may be especially jarring, particularly for students of color who feel that Charles Murray’s rhetoric poses a threat to their very humanity.” Brady said “most of the section editors, and the managing editor” of the Middlebury Campus felt that running the photograph of Murray standing on a stage “would be inappropriate.” At a speech given by Murray the previous March, a female Middlebury professor, Allison Stanger, was attacked by protesters and suffered a concussion and neck injury.
At Louisiana State University, the student paper apologized for using a photo of a black woman above a story about the school’s party culture. At Syracuse, a student paper fired a conservative columnist for writing a piece in a separate publication that called institutional racism a “myth.” A recent news article at the University of California, Davis paper called graffiti criticizing the Chinese Communist Party “racist” and “xenophobic.”
Of course, one expects to see an inordinate representation of progressive viewpoints in the opinion sections of student papers. One is more likely to see a statue of Dick Cheney on the Yale campus than an op-ed opposing abortion rights. But today’s reporters are emerging from cocoons where leftism rules every word of every section.
In many cases, this is because overwhelmingly progressive schools choose the academic advisers who control the school papers, leading to fawning coverage of school presidents and administrators. In 2018, at the University of North Alabama, an adviser was forced out of his job after the school paper exposed a system barring university employees from speaking to the media.
Meanwhile, at Marquette University, the school paper recently ran the full text of a post by a prospective student whose acceptance was revoked after she had written an offensive Snapchat about George Floyd, but refused to publish the embarrassing details when “racist” and “sexist” social-media posts made by the university president’s son were uncovered.
While the paper did name the president’s son and kept the identity of the high-school student private, it thought the details of the former were too much for readers to handle. “Rightly or wrongly, it is our opinion that doing so would serve no other purpose than to further spread offensive material,” said the reporter who broke the story. She later said she didn’t want to “spread the hurtful language and the imagery.”
However, campus papers aren’t entirely without courage. Last November, the Harvard Crimson stood up to a number of pro-immigration groups that were outraged the paper reached out to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department to comment for a story about a protest on campus. Despite the school’s Undergraduate Council voting to condemn the paper’s actions, the Crimson stood strong, recognizing that hearing the other side of any story is basic journalistic practice.
But these instances of common sense are especially notable because they are exceedingly rare. In college newspapers, citizens are getting a glimpse of what they can expect in the future — in trying not to “spread hate,” they are instead spreading disinformation.