College publications grapple with the Prophet controversy.
By Travis Mushett, Dartmouth College
Monday February 27, 2006
College publications constantly walk a tightrope between upholding freedom of the press with showing sensitivity for the myriad groups on campus. As Acton Gorton, the ousted editor in chief of the University of Illinois at Urbana’s Daily Illini discovered, when these values come into opposition with one another, the choices young journalists make can have serious consequences.
“The mainstream media was not publishing the Prophet cartoons,” Gorton told me by phone. “Students were wondering what this was all about and people had no explanation for it.” So with the goal of “facilitat[ing] discussion in the academic community,” Gorton made the decision to publish six of the controversial Muhammad cartoons that are provoking debate, anger, and occasional violence throughout the Muslim world. (You can see the cartoons here)
Campus reaction was fast and fervent after the February 9th publication, with some Muslim students organizing protests against the running of the cartoons, and others in the community lauding Gorton’s decision. The firestorm proved to be too much for the Daily Illini, and on February 15th, the publisher announced that both Gorton and opinion page editor Chuck Prochaska would be suspended from their positions, pending an investigation of the decision-making process behind the printing of the cartoons.
The editorial board of the Dartmouth Free Press, the progressive bi-weekly of which I am publisher, made the same decision as Gorton. Unaware of the imbroglio erupting in Illinois, we chose to print all 12 of the cartoons in our February 10th issue.
The decision to run the drawings came at nearly the last minute. The articles for the issue had been written and submitted and all that remained were the logistical tasks of layout and copy editing. However, as idle office conversation turned to the controversy surrounding the Prophet cartoons, we realized how few of us, and how few Dartmouth students in general, had actually seen the images.
As Gorton points out, the mainstream American media was avoiding the reprinting of the cartoons in lockstep, leaving the public uninformed as to what had sparked these fires of indignation burning throughout the Islamic world. Whether media outlets were trying to be sensitive, or merely attempting to neatly sidestep any backlash, they were all but ensuring that these images stayed suppressed.
We decided that even if the major media outlets don’t respect their audience enough to allow them to make their own judgments about world events, we did. We chose to provide the information to the public ourselves.
This was, of course, far from an endorsement of the cartoons’ content, nor was this an act of provocation for the sake of free speech. My colleagues at the Free Press and I found them to be largely repugnant and racist. Nor was it lost on us that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that commissioned the drawings, is known to have right-wing ties. But in the end, our staff was solidly behind the decision to print.
This is not to say that there was no dissent among the staff. There was debate over the nature of the cartoons and how to present them. Some staffers believed that they constituted hate speech and were reluctant to print them, while others (myself included) thought that even the most vile hate speech, short of actual threats of violence, is protected as free speech and has to be understood as the price we pay for living in a free society. In the case of these cartoons, we believed the designation of hate speech was irrelevant when compared to the context the images could provide in understanding world affairs.
Ultimately, the only issue that the DFP staff could unite on was the public’s right to know. We are not entitled to play parent to our readership, deciding what knowledge they can and cannot access. Instead, it is our duty to provide them with the information they need to better understand world events. When major media sources shirk this responsibility, it falls to smaller news sources, such as campus papers.
I wrote a short blurb to be published along with the drawings that provided some context and a rationale for our decision to run them, making it clear that this was not a mere stunt, but an attempt to provide the campus with information it lacked. Coincidentally, the Dartmouth Review, our campus’ infamous right-wing rag, published one of the Prophet cartoons that same week.
The campus reaction has been quiet and, for the most part, positive. Most students seemed to be glad to finally see what all the uproar is about. And there has been none of the outcry and backlash that Gorton and the Daily Illini faced. We didn’t receive so much as one angry letter to the editor, let alone massive protests and staff firings.
I think there are two reasons for the relatively subdued reaction. First of all, Dartmouth is a much smaller school than Illinois. We have 4,000 undergrads and they have 30,000. This means that there was a larger pool of people to offend in Urbana. Illinois also has a much larger and better organized Muslim population, which is more capable of assertive political action than anything here in Hanover, New Hampshire. If people disagreed with our decision, they may have just lacked the infrastructure to retaliate.
Secondly, unlike the Daily Illini, we are not a standard hard news publication. We proudly espouse our progressive values and frequently run articles from alternative perspectives. This dynamic makes the Free Press an often provocative paper. Consequently, the student body wasn’t all that surprised that we ran the cartoons. The Daily Illini fulfills a different campus role than we do. As the University’s designated objective news source, it was likely more shocking for students to come across incendiary images on their pages than on ours.
So while we managed to provide our student body with access to the Muhammad cartoons without causing controversy, Acton Gorton was not so lucky. He expresses little hope of regaining his job, and, despite the Daily Illini’s disputed claim that he was suspended because of the allegedly undemocratic process by which he decided to print the cartoons, he feels betrayed that his “newsroom turned against” him and is throwing him out of office through a “kangaroo court.”
The anger over the cartoons is understandable. They were, in Gorton’s own words, “bigoted and offensive.” But the firing of a journalist for attempting to inform his or her readership would be a dangerous precedent.
“If you can’t print the news,” said Gorton, “what’s the use of being in the business at all?”