our topics in newswriting are taboo: guns, gays, God and gynecology. Any time one of them is printed in the black ink that never dries, the paper’s mailbox overflows with comments and criticism. Some days, that’s a welcome thing, but too often we fear the response and avoid those issues. Newspapers are a daily business run by deadlines and caffeine, and there just isn’t time for the crises of conscience that those four Gs inspire. College journalists get away with copping out of those topics most of the time because it’s rare that a religious war is the most pressing issue in an Ivory Tower world where walls surround the campus.
Those issues exist on campuses as a dull murmur—a dull roar at most—relegated to the background by on-campus robberies, shifting residential policies, academic program adjustments and a constant stream of notable speakers. The minor stuff is the “news”; the ongoing stuff is rarely pertinent. But this semester, a couple of those topics tried to raze the barriers and make thousands of university students consider what may be the most taboo topic in America: Israel and its policies toward the Palestinian people. A group of Duke students decided over the summer to host the annual conference of the controversial Palestine Solidarity Movement. And the University decided to let them.
Suddenly, the daily news on Duke’s campus was all about guns and God, and the way they fit together. The Palestine Solidarity Movement is an umbrella organization that includes hundreds of university-based groups that support the Palestinians in their quest to form a state on land that currently, officially belongs to Israel. If that was all there was to the conference, then discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might have dominated campus discussion. Reasonable people get to disagree about guns and God, especially at a university, which trumpets itself as a haven for intellectual discussion. Students and faculty could have sat down at lunch, talking about whether unloading all financial holdings in Israel-supporting companies is useful. It could have been intellectually stimulating—and it would have been boring to write about on the front page of the newspaper.
The conference wasn’t that simple. And at least in the beginning, it wasn’t the media’s fault because the conference came with a history, and the Palestine Solidarity Movement carried an intentionally vague statement of principle. “As a solidarity movement, it is not our place to dictate the strategies or tactics adopted by the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation,” states one of the guiding principles. In other words, the movement will not condemn violence. The principle was adopted only at last year’s conference, but Jewish and Zionist and pro-Israeli groups objected to the conference’s content even before then. At previous conferences, protesters turned out by the hundreds to object to the message.
During those protests, which originally started out as issue-based demonstrations, tensions escalated and emotions ran high. At one conference a protester heard a participant yell, “Kill the Jews.” The account spread through the Internet, and objectors to the pro-Palestinian state message found a rallying point that did not necessarily require people to weigh in on Israel’s legal or moral position with respect to the Palestinian people. Killing Jews is nearly universally objectionable. The focus of the protests shifted accordingly. In previous years, people objected to the message of the conference; this year, people objected to the existence of the conference—and to Duke’s donation of facilities. When the University said the conference could go on, it accepted that fight with the Jewish and pro-Israeli community.
The discussion became muddled. In one corner were the people who objected to the pro-Palestinian message (who wanted to ensure the pro-Israeli voice was heard); in another corner was the Palestine Solidarity Movement (which just wanted to explain a Palestinian-sympathetic view of the conflict). But in a square ring, there are two more corners, and those corners sheltered the rainbow of extremists from both sides: The conference shouldn’t be allowed at Duke, Israel shouldn’t exist; they are terrorists, they terrorize us. The fighters themselves created so much ruckus it drowned out the reactions of the people who were watching—at Duke or anywhere else. The media got to serve as the boxing ring itself, all the while claiming objective commentary.
The reporters tried to reconcile these two simultaneous yet contradictory roles. By selecting interviewees and placing quotations, we got to set up the fights. From the traditional view of news, one of two points had to be the center of any news story. Without the Palestine Solidarity Movement, there would be no conflict. If it had not taken place at Duke, we wouldn’t have cared. Both of those groups were being attacked for their policies from the outside, and neither of them wanted to talk about how they were under fire.
Driven by outside attacks that relied largely on internet-disseminated information, the University and the Palestine Solidarity Movement independently made the primary issue leading up to the conference a freedom-of-speech fight. They answered boring questions about why freedom of speech was good and addressed allegations with simple diversions back to the importance of letting all views be heard. The media complied because we rarely walk away from a First Amendment fight, and we were all on deadline. At best, we are ardent protectors of freedom of expression; at worst, we are blind defenders of atrocious thoughts. In a brawl like this one, sometimes the media, in its pressure to rush to publication, blurs the line between defending the right to express views and defending the views themselves.
We focused on finding worthy opponents for the two groups’ well-practiced publicity machines to spar with. The Jewish community on campus officially supported the conference’s right to convene at Duke. They wanted to talk about views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead of arguing about whether an entity that allows violence had a right to air its opinions. Outside groups, though, were more than happy to wrangle metaphorically over freedom of speech in the pages of the newspapers; they were mad and they wanted people to know.
As a reporter, I got at least three phone calls a day from people objecting to the conference who were just looking to get some of their words printed. The Jewish extremist who calls my office and threatens to stop the conference “by any means necessary” is a much better—and much easier—story than the campus Jewish leader who wants to talk about Israel. To talk about Israel, I have to introduce a discussion about guns and God; to write about threats, all I have to do is call a couple of people to verify the validity of the threat.
New people kept calling and objecting to the conference in new ways, and every time someone said something new or sensational; we in the media considered it new news. We got spun by the University’s argument for academic freedom, but what is more troubling is that we got spun by our own rules of what constitutes news. We never wrote the story about how less than 10 percent of students cared enough about the Israeli-Palestinian conference to attend any of the events about the conflict in October. We never wrote about the full financial cost of the conference to Duke, with all the security that proved unnecessary, and all the time that multiple senior staff members devoted to the thousands of complaints that the University fielded, and all the donations that will never be given because alumni are so offended that the conference was allowed. For some of that, we did the reporting but never managed to find a news hook that would justify the story. For others, we never thought to ask the questions.
We never wrote about the fallout from the conference that still persists and will likely continue to drag on at the University for years to come. About the way that the experience of the conference left some groups in the community feeling so vulnerable that an accidental insult could cause all the emotion that has percolated since the conference to ooze back to the top. About whether or how Duke, which never received applause for its support of the Jewish community, will restore its reputation with national Jewish groups.
The difficulty with telling those stories is that they don’t necessarily have two sides. Stories about opposing groups creates a veil of objectivity: When we pit two sides against each other, at least we can say we have two sides. To explain, we have to declare a solid vantage point. Our reluctance to do that means we often miss the point—news doesn’t happen at extremes. When the media forces issues to be adversarial, we often silence the vast middle ground. We give voice to the groups and people that surround issues, people who all have an agenda to pursue, and we neglect the issues themselves.
If we really want to talk about guns and God (and gays and gynecology), we have to alter the rules upon which the media depends. Because taboo topics are impossible to objectively explain.
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