Long known as the Fourth Estate for its commitment to objectivity and balance, journalism has come under attack at two US universities after protests were reported by student newspapers.
According to several experts, the protests, which happened at Northwestern and Harvard Universities, make it clear “there is a growing generational preference for prioritising political goals over objective truth and balance”.
At both universities, student journalists came under attack for endeavouring to report the protests objectively rather than paying more attention to the protestors’ causes.
Several experts believe such attacks reflect a generation that believes the news media are “politically slanted” and are sceptical about concepts such as objectivity, truth and free speech.
Kathleen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said: “The idea is not that news journalism is supposed to be free, fair and independent – it should be on my side.
“And I think that’s highly problematic within a democracy,” she told Times Education.
Although a sceptical view of news has been widely studied in recent years – particularly in the era of Trump and ‘fake news’ – the newspaper revolt at both universities show that it has infiltrated even the highly educated.
At Harvard, the student council and hundreds of community members lambasted its student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, for asking a government agency – Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – to comment on a protest against it. The protest, organised by a group called Act on a Dream, called for the abolition of the ICE. The Washington Post reported that “this standard editorial practice” of requesting comment was excoriated by the group in an online petition, saying it showed “cultural insensitivity” and ignored the ICE’s record of “surveilling and retaliating against activists”.
Meanwhile, Northwestern University’s student newspaper The Daily Northwestern apologised after publishing photos of a protest against former Trump administration attorney general Jeff Sessions. The newspaper was also heavily criticised for “how they contacted some participants [of the protest] for comment”. Professional journalists criticised the apology, seeing it as pandering to particular political views.
1000-plus signatories scolded Harvard’s Crimson, including Aaron Van Neste, a doctoral candidate at Harvard. He wrote that the newspaper should “consider the ethics of their alleged neutrality in the face of atrocities committed by [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement]”. Patricia Manos, a doctoral student in art, wrote that calling the ICE for comment would alert “them to the presence of undocumented students and workers on campus”.
The editors of the Crimson, however, said they “respected” the protestors and community members’ concerns and provided no details of the participants to the ICE. The editors of the student newspaper later met with critics, refusing their thinly veiled demands to stop contacting people with different political views.
Universities are seen as a bulwark against attacks on the truth and differing perspectives and Professor Culver covers this in a media law unit she teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For instance, she challenges students to consider other perspectives by asking them to argue against their preferred political views on issues including abortion. She believes other universities could be conducting similar exercises to challenge their students to consider alternative views.
However, Professor Matthew Baum is sceptical, arguing students normally arrived on campus with a “pretty well formed” set of values.
“I cannot imagine a course that a university could teach that would alter this perspective fundamentally,” he said.