Today I met with the editor-in-chief of my campus’s notoriously offensive and incompetent tax-funded newspaper. At one point, we began explaining how “interviewing an uninformed bystander” cannot serve as a replacement for actual information. As an illustration, I referred her to last year’s coverage of Take Back the Night. In an effort to seem “balanced,” the reporter interviewed uninformed bystanders (who weren’t actually in attendance at the event). The journalistic method looked something like this: for every anti-rape activist you interview, you must interview someone who disagrees with that anti-rape activist. If that anti-rape activist’s argument is “rape is a problem on campus,” then you must, apparently, find someone that you can quote saying that rape is not, in fact, in their opinion, a problem on campus. This maintains objectivity, I guess. Observe:
The issues involved with Take Back the Night particularly should resonate with students on MSU’s campus, Spencer said. She said she believes the general attitude about rape needs to change.
Hospitality business freshman Lizzy Braxton agreed sexual violence still is in today’s culture, but she does not see sexual violence being an issue on MSU’s campus.“(My friends and I) don’t see it. We don’t notice it. We don’t know anyone who has been sexually assaulted here,” Braxton said. “We don’t see it as a big deal.”
Microbiology sophomore Patrick Ropp also hasn’t seen the effects of sexual violence.
“I’m a sophomore, and I haven’t really encountered any sexual violence (or) sexual abuse since I’ve been here,” he said. “I’m sure it has potential, but I haven’t run into it yet.”
Let’s tally this up:
- number of anti-rape activists/Take Back the Night participants interviewed: 4 women
- number of (self-proclaimed) survivors interviewed: 1 woman
- number of bystanders who did not participate in TBTN interviewed saying that they think rape is nbd: 2 (1 woman, 1 man)
- number of statistics or figures cited: 0
I’m hardly surprised. When I still wrote for my school’s paper, I tried to write an investigative piece on the school’s history of Clery Act violations. I got laughed at in the newsroom, and was mansplained by some other staff writers that sexual assault wasn’t a problem because “girls outnumber boys here” and that I was being “extreme” by stating that the school violated the federal law. The editor also wanted to put me in the opinions section, and then just refused to edit my piece because it was “too biased,” and it would start too much trouble.
I just want to take a moment to point out how this false standard of “objectivity” that so many journalism students yammer on about is actually just newspeak for “keeping the status-quo as safe as possible.” I realized that a school newspaper is really just there to bolster the school’s image— whatever that looks like, I know at New School they loved flaunting the Williamsburg hipster vibes— and pander to administrators, who come up with the newspaper’s budget. The school newspaper, like many other “fair and balanced” news sources, is really just there to assuage the instability of the institution— or even pretend like it was never there.
That’s the day I stopped being a journalist. Instead of writing vapid articles about knitting and Brooklyn, I just decided to tackle the real issues at hand. My friends and I raised some hell about our school’s policy, wrote our own shit and made our own investigations which led to a policy change and a lawsuit [outcome yet to be determined]. Like, there are some journalists here and there who aren’t afraid to get down and dirty; eventually we got really good coverage from a new guy at the school paper who spent a lot of time researching federal and state sexual assault laws. But those are few and far between. It’s just the fact that they don’t want to a) do the work and b) risk feeling uncomfortable, especially not for some newspaper assignment. Think they could use some radical vulnerability?
