When Breitbart quotes your newspaper

A few weeks ago, in a NewsFix roundup, I quoted an article from The Huntington News on a Student Against Trump rally held on Nov. 17.

Towsif Ahasan, a junior economics and business major, called for change to be made at all levels of government, especially within states.

“What I am interested in is material change. We have to make a difference at the state and local level now,” he said to the crowd. “People of color […] matter in New York and Massachusetts, but they matter in Idaho and Kansas too.”

Ahasan also encouraged students to oppose Trump by any means necessary.

“Exercise your Second Amendment right,” he said through the megaphone. “Let’s make the [National Rifle Association] NRA regret giving us the right to bear arms.”

I should reiterate that I’m currently the opinions editor at The News, so I have a hand in the editorial process for almost everything we publish. However, I didn’t get to this particular story during the editorial phase. I was “busy” watching “Hamilton’s America” on PBS. I did want to read it, though, so once I had finished the documentary, I opened the article in my browser and read it on our site.

Ahasan’s quote was jarring. It threw me for a loop, both as a person and as an editor.

In the Huntington News GroupMe, affectionately called “Newsies,” I quickly sent a message: “hey uh that second amendment quote makes me uncomfortable from an ethical/potentially legal standpoint. What was the overriding public interest in publishing the second part of that quote?”

The conversation went back and forth for a bit, primarily among myself, news editor Olivia and sports editor James, who wrote the story. At one point, someone referenced Trump’s close-to-threatening comment on Hillary Clinton in August.

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”

I said it was different because (1) no one was going to come for Trump — the man seems to be able to get away with anything — and (2) the speaker, in our instance, was not the president-elect of the United States, but a college kid.

James countered: “Any incitement to violence is of public interest.” Which essentially resolved the issue. I couldn’t disagree.

A few days later, on the morning of Nov. 20, News city editor Alejandro sent the GroupMe this article from BizPac Review, “a privately held, for-profit news and opinion website covering news that matters to conservatives throughout Florida and the United States.”

There were nearly 500 comments on the article by the time I clicked on it. That in itself was mind-boggling. Did that many people really have time to yell on the Internet? (The answer to that question is always a resounding yes.)

A bit of surfing revealed that BizPac Review — which I had never heard of; either it’s not widespread or it’s too conservative to show up in my usual circles — was far from the only conservative outlet to pick up the story. After just a day, the infamous Breitbart had taken our article and run with it.

Breitbart, as bizarre and awful as it is, has a mighty following. Other similar alt-right outlets had picked up the Breitbart story and run it on their own sites. Some Reddit users on r/conspiracy seemed intent on doxing the kid; they had figured out where he worked. Breitbart commenters were saying they had filed tips with the FBI.

The other newsies and I were in somewhat of a frenzy. “I can’t shake the feeling that this kid’s life is about to be ruined very shortly,” I wrote. Already, these were the results coming up for Ahasan’s name on DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t track personal information or game the search results:

Were we responsible for this?

No. We were not.

News editor-in-chief and my good friend Sam entered the chat. Ethically, he said, we were fine. There was, as we had decided, an overriding public interest in publishing Ahasan’s quote. Additionally, James had followed all News policy and ethical standards in his reporting.

However, James, a wonderful human who is not only a good journalist but who is literally helping me move next month, was still twisted up. As the person who wrote the article, he worried that something he did might ruin someone’s life. But at the end of the day, Ahasan said what he said and stood by it, and in my book, it would have been irresponsible not to report it.

“It shouldn’t feel great that a toxic side of the internet is (talking about) coming for a college kid,” Sam told James in the GroupMe. “What I want you to try to hold on to is that that is not on you.”

I’m so tired of hearing the phrases “the Age of the Internet” or “the Information Age,” because they’re such buzzwords. They’ve begun to lose their meaning. But I think the important thing to remember is how easily things can go viral on various parts of the Internet — liberal Facebook, conservative Facebook, Twitter, alt-right sites, conspiracy forums.

There’s a new question in addition to “Is this of interest to the public?” It’s “How much of the public is how interested in this, and why?” Although we have experts, including folks at Northeastern, studying virality, it still seems like a bit of a mystery. One student shouted one thing — albeit an inflammatory, incorrect thing that he should not have said— into a megaphone at a college rally attended by only around 100 people. We reported on it, because that’s our job. Immediately, people on the Internet began talking about getting him fired or even investigated by the FBI.

On Sunday, Max Read wrote an article for New York Magazine called “Maybe the Internet Isn’t a Fantastic Tool for Democracy After All.”

The question we face now is: What happens when the industry destroyed is professional politics, the institutions leveled are the same few that prop up liberal democracy, and the values the internet disseminates are racism, nationalism, and demagoguery?

What indeed? I think, when we talked about the future of news, that we envisioned a showdown between big tech companies and traditional news outlets. The New York Times v. Googlezon. I don’t know if we envisioned The New York Times up against Breitbart. I don’t know if we envisioned the fight between democracy and demagoguery/nationalism/bigotry as this: Institutions just trying to report facts up against inflammatory cesspools designed to rile people up.

And as much as I love journalism as a catalyst for change, I’m not sure this one’s on us. I think we have to keep doing what we’re doing, as well as hold ourselves to a really high standard and report accurate, thorough information. Beyond that, we can only ask our readers to help support us (yes, I do mean monetarily) and hope the consumers and the algorithm are on our side.

Activists and journalists share the responsibility of reporting

A trend has recently come to the forefront of conversations surrounding activism on campus. Many advocacy organizations operate on a principle of “solidarity” to achieve social justice.

At first glance, this makes sense. It’s difficult to get momentum going behind a cause if there isn’t a significant portion of the population supporting it. However, solidarity should not be misused to shut down conversation — and journalism.

In my first post on this blog, I pointed out that student activists tend to distrust media outlets. To quote myself: I honestly can’t say that I blame them. When mainstream media outlets like Fox News (although this may be an extreme example) send out people like Jesse Watters with the explicit purpose of making fun of student advocacy, it’s a natural response to be wary.

There’s a problem, however, when journalists are barred from reporting on activist movements entirely because they haven’t explicitly expressed solidarity. Last year, students at the University of Missouri who were calling for President Tim Wolfe’s resignation surprised reporters by setting up a “no media safe space” at a Nov. 9 protest.

A few days later, there was a similar response at Loyola University in Chicago.

Organizers led students in a brief march around campus in which they chanted, “Not just Mizzou, it’s Loyola too!” before stopping at Halas field, where they locked hands and members of The Black Tribune asked the media, not including those from their own publication, to stand outside the perimeter.

“Hey, no media in the circle,” Ryan Sorrell, chief editor of The Black Tribune, said holding his hand up to a cameraman. “Sorry, man. You’re good, but just not in the circle.”

Here in Massachusetts, a Nov. 18, 2015 sit-in at Smith College garnered substantial media attention when reporters were completely barred from covering the action, which involved between 300 and 500 students.

Alyssa Mata-Flores, a 21-year-old Smith College senior and one of the sit-in’s organizers, explained that the rule was born from “the way that media has historically painted radical black movements as violent and aggressive.”

“We are asking that any journalists or press that cover our story participate and articulate their solidarity with black students and students of color,” she told MassLive in the Student Center Wednesday. “By taking a neutral stance, journalists and media are being complacent in our fight.”

Smith organizers said journalists were welcome to cover the event if they agreed to explicitly state they supported the movement in their articles.

Stacey Schmeidel, Smith College director of media relations, said the college supports the activists’ ban on media.

“It’s a student event, and we respect their right to do that, although it poses problems for the traditional media,” Stacey Schmeidel said.

Damn right it poses problems for the traditional media. It would not be ethically responsible for journalists to declare solidarity with a movement before covering a related event. Reporters, while they certainly may have their own opinions in private, aren’t for or against movements while they’re journalists. They are, ideally, completely objective, with an interest in keeping a reasonably good relationship with activists in order to report on their cause effectively.

To prevent an adversarial relationship, both advocates and journalists have to hold the media to a high standard of objectivity. Mata-Flores was right to point out the historical bias against black movements, and it would be ignorant to suggest that such bias does not continue today at many outlets. However, the fourth estate cannot do its job properly without access.

My message, to both reporters and activists, is simple: Don’t shut down the conversation.