Michael Weiner
Newspapers are supposed to report on controversies, not start
them. But that’s exactly what UC Berkeley’s Daily
Californian did a week and a half ago when it ran an inflammatory
advertisement advocating against reparations for African American
descendants of slaves ““ and after a campus uproar ensued,
apologized for the ad.
The Daily Cal’s actions have sparked a national debate
about freedom of speech and political correctness on college
campuses. For those liberal, baby-boomer journalists who look back
on the Berkeley-based Free Speech Movement of the ’60s and
’70s with near-idolatry, the front-page apology by the Daily
Cal was anathema to the high-and-mighty principles of journalism
and the First Amendment.
The purpose of this column is not to argue for or against
reparations; well-meaning people can disagree on the issue. For the
record, I am among the 75 percent of Americans who oppose
reparations, mostly because I believe our country’s resources
would be better spent on social policies that extend equality of
opportunity to all disadvantaged citizens.
Nevertheless, the most interesting aspect of all this hubbub is
not the subject matter of the ad, which was placed by
neoconservative commentator David Horowitz. It is not even whether
or not the ad was racist, although I’ll get to that shortly.
The most striking aspect of this controversy is the way the
professional media have latched onto it as an example of everything
that is wrong with today’s college students.
Like so many self-aggrandizing members of their generation,
mainstream journalists have difficulty understanding the
Mumia-loving, WTO-hating campus activism of today’s students,
who eschew the mushy, simplistic, “We Shall Overcome”
togetherness that characterized the 1960s protest movements. I
would argue that it was the naiveté of these movements that
resulted in their splintering after 1968.
Mainstream media outlets across the country have weighed in on
the ad, which was also run and subsequently retracted by UC
Davis’ California Aggie ““ the Daily Bruin has not been
approached about the advertisement. Most pundits have slammed the
two papers for succumbing to the “politically correct”
rantings of campus activists. The musings of Washington Post
columnist Jonathan Yardley are characteristic of the self-important
condescension with which professional journalists have attacked
these young upstarts.
“(On) the college campus it is more important to be
politically … correct than to be right,” Yardley writes
with all the trumped-up moral authority he can muster. “This
explains why the editors of these two California college newspapers
caved in to the protesters without, apparently, even a whinny in
their own defense …” (“Politically Corrected,”
The Washington Post, March 5, 2001).
A curious observer might ask why so many members of the
“liberal” media are so outraged about the way two
college newspapers dealt with an avowedly right-wing advertisement.
The answer tells us a lot about the insecurity of American
journalists, who pay lip service to free speech but know deep down
that self-censorship is as much a reality at the New York Times and
Washington Post as it is at the Daily Cal.
As for the ad itself, it was titled “Ten Reasons Why
Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks ““ and Racist
Too.” For the sake of space, I will examine only the first
statement, which claims “there is no single group clearly
responsible for the crime of slavery.” Putting the dubious
facts the ad uses to justify this claim aside, any effort to blame
slavery on African Americans ““ which is what Horowitz
attempts to do ““ is akin to blaming the Holocaust on
Jews.
Thus, it is understandable why many people would consider the ad
racist and why a financially insecure college paper in liberal
Berkeley wouldn’t want to be associated with it.
If the same ad were placed by, say, the Ku Klux Klan, I
seriously doubt that The Washington Post would be so eager to
defend it. The real, hidden reason for the media’s outrage is
that David Horowitz is one of them. He is not a fringe lunatic; he
is a respected, mainstream, conservative columnist. And the
journalism world is understandably defensive about its sponsorship
of Horowitz and others like him, especially when correspondingly
leftist pundits are so few and far between.
If Horowitz is racist, then what does that say about a media
culture that doesn’t just tolerate but actively supports him
and his ilk? Don’t let the self-important, free-speech
rhetoric of the media fool you. The full-frontal attack on the
Daily Cal is about self-interest, and nothing else.