|
opinion:
manifesto
When a free press
really isn't free
Being a UC Berkeley
student must be tough, not having a free press.
The Daily Californian,
the student newspaper at UC Berkeley, attracted media attention
last week after issuing an apology for running an advertisement
against slavery reparations.
The advertisement
came from David Horowitz, a 1960s radical who is now a conservative
commentator. He is not to be confused with consumer advocate
David Horowitz of "Fight Back!" fame. The advertisement
was an op-ed piece, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for
Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks and Racist, Too,"
which ran on Feb. 28 the last day of Black History Month.
The advertisement
denounced reparations based on historical facts to statements
of opinion.
Claiming that very
few whites in the South owned slaves and Africans, and Arabs
abetted in the enslavement of blacks. The advertisement included
opinionated statements like, "Yet the African-American
community has had a long-running flirtation with separatists,
nationalists and the political left, who want African-Americans
to be no part of America's social contract."
The advertisement
angered the campus, and Daily Californian editor-in-chief
Daniel Hernandez wrote a response a day after the advertisement
ran.
He apologized to
the students that may have been offended by the ad and said
that the Daily Californian did not know what were the internal
protocols for running controversial content.
Another letter
of apology, speaking for the Daily Californian staff, said
the ad "allowed the Daily Cal to ‘become an inadvertent
vehicle for bigotry.'"
The recent events
have prompted the Daily Californian to re-examine its policies
on controversial content.
This sounds like
upholding the First Amendment is less important than being
an organ for the political correctness UC Berkeley is famous
for.
"Some may
subscribe to the First Amendment in defending yesterday's
ad," Hernandez wrote, "but, in my view at least,
freedom of speech is compromised when it is bought."
That is a poor rationale, since the First Amendment protects
advertisements as a form of free speech.
Also, Hernandez
never mentioned whether Horowitz's anti-reparation piece would
have run had it not been a paid advertisement.
After all, the
piece's content would not be any less provocative if it ran
on the op-ed page. In all likelihood, it would have never
ran for free because the newspaper would not dare print an
unpopular perspective and offend the student body.
The Daily Californian
asserts that the ad was bigoted, but they never bothered to
point out what exactly was bigoted and why. In an academic
environment like Berkeley, scholars could have deconstructed
the ad, sentence by sentence, and used historical evidence
to find falsehoods in Horowitz's ad or to prove it was in
fact bigoted.
The ad certainly
generated strong emotions. That is exactly what a free press
is supposed to do. Readers should be exposed to a variety
of viewpoints, even ones they detest.
The Daily Californian
printed an ad that many students hated, but the apologies
should not be a promise to suppress content that is ideologically
unpalatable, be it reparations or anything else.
Chris Ledermuller
is a print journalism major at Cal State Long Beach.
|
