Do you interview a visiting white supremacist before his speech?
Or a nativist?
Or a neo-Nazi?
Or Jew-hater?
Or white-hating African-American?
Or anyone whose identity-based grievance expresses itself in hate speech?
Cincinnati reporters must face that question if alt-right leader and white nationalist Richard Spencer comes to speak at UC in March.
If Spencer agrees, I don’t envy the reporter, especially if the assignment goes to a Jew or Muslim, an African-American or other person of color.
Spencer’s speech and the protesters must be covered; it’s newsworthy, but does that justify an interview?
That’s the challenge to news judgment, knowing an interview would give aid and comfort to Spencer’s fellow-travelers and risk exaggerating their numbers and impact.
I’ve interviewed unapologetic bigots whose response to me ranged from “Christ killer” to contempt for my stiff-necked rejection of their promise of eternal life. In another time and place, I interviewed black and white racists who made no efforts to conceal their hostility to my race.
Good luck with Spencer.
What do you ask a provocateur? Does being loathed confirm his convictions? Is he familiar with any of the people he vilifies? Does he eat wings and shop at Walmart?
That latter approach landed the New York Times in shit when a major profile suggested that Tony Hovator was a typical young Ohioan despite his neo-Nazi beliefs.
The journalistic sin was “normalization” of a Hitler-admiring racist.
For Spencer’s visit, one response would be to skip an interview opportunity; don’t give him an additional platform.
Another would be to do the interview, knowing it will amplify — but expose — his beliefs; “Fight words with words.”
Liberal writer Gary Younge addressed these issues after interviewing Spencer for a British TV documentary. Here’s part of what Younge wrote:
“In the clip of our conversation — in which Spencer appears visibly shocked that I turned out to be a black man — he argued that African Americans benefited from slavery and white supremacy and insisted that I could not be both British and black.
“After about half an hour, I called time on the interview, pointing out that he was ignorant and had nothing to say.
“I was conflicted about whether I should have talked to him at all, but given his connections to Breitbart News and Steve Bannon and the racially divisive and explosive mood created by Trump, I felt, on balance, it made sense.
“That balance is important. Nazis should not be ignored. They are dangerous. We need to understand where they’re coming from, what motivates them, and what their strategies are. Ignoring bigotry doesn’t make it go away.
“The basic principles of journalism still apply: They should not be misrepresented, lampooned, or caricatured. But neither should they be indulged. We should not inflate their importance, ignore their brutality, or enable their self-aggrandizement. They are not regular politicians. Violence is central to their method; exclusion is central to their meaning.
“Instead, they should be confronted, challenged, and exposed. How we engage them — and why — is an issue of political morality. This is an imperative that sits uneasily with flaccid notions of journalistic objectivity, in which those views that make it through the filter are considered equal, regardless of their factual or moral integrity. ‘On the one hand, on the other hand’ doesn’t work here: You can’t weigh genocide against relatively stable democracy as though any reasonable person might disagree on the outcome.
“In these moments — and with the rise of the far right across the Western world, there are many of them — the claim that journalists sit above society, as though in a hermetically sealed chamber, responsible only to their editors and ‘the story,’ becomes increasingly thin.”
But back to Spencer.
Younge has the stature to challenge and walk out on Spencer. I don’t know if a Cincinnati reporter could do that.
Spencer’s shtick is to provoke, but UC failed to take the bait when — uninvited by any campus group — he tested its tolerance by asking for a venue.
UC trustees refused to refuse him a place on campus. Instead, they defended free speech, affirming that a public university should be a “marketplace of ideas” including those it does not condone.
By protecting Spencer’s opportunity to speak, UC trustees defended everyones’ embattled right to express unpopular views on campus.
UC president Neville G. Pinto went further. He said UC would do what’s necessary to assure everyone’s security if Spencer appears.
This contrasts with public universities that stupidly bow to student threats of violence and reject alt-right or conservative speakers. Unlike UC’s Pinto, cowardly administrators typically cite costs of security to justify censorship.
UC’s leadership also should remind aggrieved students that they have no right to not be offended and they will not be allowed to decide who doesn’t speak on campus.
Moreover, going beyond constitutional, reasonable restrictions on time and place, any limit based on a speech’s content would run into the First Amendment.
Of course, this larger issue has a Cincinnati connection.
A local case brought by the late civil liberties lawyer Allen Brown helped define what it takes for hate speech to lose its First Amendment protection.
In 1919, Ohio made it illegal to “advocate crime, sabotage, violence or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform…”
Almost half a century later, klan leader Clarence Brandenburg was prosecuted under that old criminal syndicalism law.
Brandenburg’s alleged crime wasn’t his call at a local klan rally for America to send blacks back to Africa or Jews to Israel.
Rather, it was his threat “that there might have to be some revengeance taken … if our President, our Congress or our Supreme Court continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race.”
And a march on Washington was planned.
The U.S. Supreme Court tossed Brandenburg’s conviction and the 1919 law.
The court said speech loses constitutional protection when it is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and it is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
Brandenburg didn’t do that.
Moreover, the law wrongly criminalized advocacy and teaching of doctrines when they didn’t incite imminent lawless action.
With today’s internet, hate speech has infinite opportunities and few legal limits and little moderating historical context.
Still, bigots crave validation and only derided mainstream publishing/broadcasting can provide that. That why they talk to reporters.
Let Spencer and others speak and trust most Americans’ abilities to recognize hate speech and reject bigots’ assertions of virtue.
And if he wants an interview, let him have it.
Curmudgeon Notes
• The widow of a Republican Kentucky legislator rounded angrily on journalists who reported the accusation of sexual assault that drove him to suicide.
Reporters R.G. Dunlop and Jacob Ryan said a 17-year-old claimed pastor/legislator Dan Johnson assaulted her five years ago. Their story was published last month by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.
“I am confident if that little greasy reporter had not done what he did, my husband would be alive today,” Rebecca Johnson told a TV interviewer.
Johnson denied molesting his daughter’s friend Maranda Richmond and he likened himself to accused child molester Roy Moore in Alabama.
In a Facebook post shortly before shooting himself in the head, Johnson said in part, “The accusations of NPR are false GOD and only GOD knows the truth, nothing is the way they make it out to be. AMERICA will not survive this type of judge and jury fake news.”
The president of Louisville Public Media defended the reporting and noted unsuccessful pre-publication attempts to talk to Dan Johnson.
“I’m going to be nice but that’s bullshit,” Rebecca Johnson responded. “These guys to do not represent our values, so how could they even be fair?” She also told the AP, “These high-tech lynchings based on lies and half-truths can’t be allowed to win the day.”
• Lake effect snow blowing over Erie, Pa., promoted rare nostalgia.
Yes, I walked uphill through drifts to my elementary and high schools and home again in Minneapolis. We were on one side of a hill and they were on the other.
Yes, snow can hide a car. During one blizzard, I found a huge overnight drift covering my British sports car. Instead of digging it out in the dark, I trudged to the nearest highway. There, I thumbed rides and walked to the Star newsroom on time for my regular 6 a.m shift.
Along the way, I shot weather images. The Star was an afternoon paper. First edition photos were all mine; staff photographers began arriving and mine were dumped in later editions.
No one found it remarkable that colleagues reached the office on snowmobiles, cross-country skis or snowshoes.
• Among their thankless jobs, copy editors are supposed to protect reporters from appearing foolish. That’s why there must have been a brain freeze during editing of an important Enquirer story about Cincinnati Park Board finances.
The otherwise savvy story first described the fight over money as an “epic battle” and later as a “squabble.” Can’t be both.
• And some Enquirer editor should have asked why no opponent of the controversial Eastern (traffic) Corridor was quoted in the full-page story last weekend. This brouhaha has gone on for years and Enquirer archives have plenty of critics who object to all or parts of the proposed route between Cincinnati and parts of Clermont County. I hope this isn’t another case of the Enquirer boosting a project through its news columns instead of its opinion pages.
• When I first read about the movie The Post, I thought the reviewer erred. New York Times broke the Pentagon Papers story, not the Washington Post.
And in a major First Amendment victory, the Times carried the day in the U.S. Supreme Court and won the Pulitzer Prize for its Pentagon Papers coverage.
As Huffington Post put it, “It did not share this prize with the Post any more than the Post shared its prize for Watergate coverage with the Times. For Hollywood now to create the impression that The Washington Post was the key driver responsible for the publication of the Pentagon Papers or the case is — well, it’s Hollywood: good drama but bad history.”
• Speaking of Hollywood’s take on history, TV trailers for the film Darkest Hour recount Churchill’s doughty contempt for appeasers in Britain’s aristocracy and Parliament early in WWII when Germany seemed invincible. The voice-over assures us it’s based on a “true story.” Yup. That was World War II. No fake news there.
• Trump’s newly confirmed ambassador to the Netherlands, Pete Hoekstra, shares his boss’ contempt for truth. That became obvious when Dutch TV reporter Wouter Zwart asked about anti-Muslim comments while Hoekstra was a Michigan GOP congressman.
Hoekstra was on a panel in 2015 called, “Muslim Migration into Europe: Eurabia Come True?”
Then, he called refugees “invaders” and said Muslim migrants were “the next wave of Jihadists in Europe.”
Warning of a “stealth jihad” in the U.S. and Europe, panelist Hoekstra claimed, “The Islamic movement has now gotten to a point where they have put Europe into chaos. Chaos in the Netherlands. There are cars being burned. There are politicians that are being burned . . . and yes, there are no-go zones in the Netherlands.”
Last month, shortly after being sworn in, Hoekstra denied his no-go zones claim.
“I didn’t say that. That is actually an incorrect statement. We would call it fake news. I never said that.”
Then, at being shown the video clip of his comments, Hoekstra said, “I didn’t call that fake news. I didn’t use the words today. I didn’t think I did.”
Confronted with what the Guardian called the “cringeworthy exchange” on Dutch TV, Hoekstra tweeted, “I made certain remarks in 2015 and regret the exchange during the Nieuwsuur interview. Please accept my apology.”
The Guardian’s story explained sensitivity to Hoekstra’s 2015 comments this way:
“The myth of ‘no-go zones,’ concentrated pockets of Muslim immigrants in Europe so hostile to outsiders that non-Muslims cannot safely pass, has been widely debunked. It still, however, remains popular in some conservative and anti-Islamic circles and reached its peak shortly after the January 2015 terror attacks in Paris.”
• Three points often are missing from recent news. First, defending protesters’ rights defends their critics’ rights. That’s because one group’s exercise of First Amendment rights to speak freely can’t be denied without undermining their critics’ freedom to protest.
Second, after Alabaman Roy Moore’s claim that he never dated children or older teenagers without their mothers’ permission, reporters ignored whether the power of consent belongs to the mothers or the girls.
And finally, how will the U.S. build a new embassy Jerusalem in without Palestinian labor?
• A wonderful word is a casualty of the Trump administrations enthusiasm for demonstrably false alternative facts: “refute.”
Refute means to disprove, as in photos from space refute Flat Earth claims.
Instead, too many people in the news say refute when they mean “rebut,” which is to respond, not disprove.
Recent examples involved Moore. He rebutted the accusations; except for likeminded supporters, he never refuted them. Similarly, his wife rebutted accusations of anti-semitism, saying one of their lawyers was a Jew. At least she didn’t claim, “Some of our best friends are…”
• Daily Beast headlined “How the Era of the Big-Name Anchor Crashed to an End.” It focused on Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and Bill O’Reilly and called them news anchors. Whatever they anchored, it wasn’t news.
CONTACT BEN L. KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jan 3-10, 2018.
