When Charlie Szold, editor-in-chief of American University’s student newspaper, The Eagle, prepared his staff to cover a protest by a well-known hate group last week, he faced two age-old questions that seem more relevant than ever:
Should the media cover groups that deliberately use hateful messages as publicity stunts? And, if so, how should journalists go about covering hate speech?
In this case, the hate group was the Westboro Baptist Church, recently in the news for threatening to protest the funeral of 9-year-old Christina Green and other Tucson shooting victims. The church, made up of Rev. Fred Phelps and his family members, has been the focus of a U.S. Supreme Court case, in which justices are considering the group’s right to protest military funerals with its trademark inflammatory signs. “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” is a common slogan, as are anti-gay, anti-Obama, anti-Jewish and Muslim signs.
I asked Szold and The Eagle’s faculty adviser, my colleague Lynne Perri, about covering the protest. Perri, a journalist-in-residence at the university, said her role as adviser of the editorially independent newspaper was informal; she gave Szold some ideas and was on hand to answer questions.
The staff ran an online news story on the day of the protest, and later ran two pieces in the week’s print edition as well as online: a full version of the news story and a profile of a 19-year-old member of the church.
“We thought the story of Zach Phelps-Roper was a compelling one,” Szold said of the nursing major at Washburn University. “It was surprising for our reporter to find herself talking to a peer who was so normal in so many ways, yet so different.”
TBD blogger Amanda Hess criticized the student counterprotest and an editorial in The Eagle, asserting that the university should have ignored the church’s “barely-comprehensible, poorly-sourced vitriol.”
Ultimately, Szold said, the 700-plus student counterprotest made the event hard to ignore. “What the Westboro Baptist Church does,” he said, “is of importance to our community.” But after the fact, he couldn’t help wondering if the entire university community, its media included, “are suckers for giving them so much attention.”
Perri said the choice to cover a protest allows readers to decide for themselves about a group. “If you don’t cover it, readers feel like you are already making an editorial call,” she said. Given that the Westboro Baptist Church has been in the news so much lately, she added, it makes sense that the paper would cover the protest.
Szold’s experience covering the protest reflects the difficulties journalists wrestle with when deciding how and whether to cover groups like Phelps’. Just think, for instance, about the debate over the media frenzy surrounding Pastor Terry Jones’ Quran-burning. Lately, many of the debates following the Tucson shooting have focused on the news media’s responsibility for perpetuating hateful rhetoric.
The use of slurs in protests such as the Westboro Baptist Church’s presents other challenges for journalists. For example, a press release announcing the protest described American University as “fag-infested” and “pervert-run.” The group also planned to protest at Richard Holbrooke’s funeral and the Islamic Center on Massachusetts Avenue, near the university.
Perri said it’s important to balance being truthful about the content of the protest and not repeating hateful language more than necessary. “The readers don’t need to be bombarded by that, nor do they need to be protected,” he said.
I asked Szold if the protesters had used racist or sexist language, “for example, the n-word or the c-word, instead of the word ‘fag,’ ” would they have printed those quotes?
Szold said the decisions are often made based on gut reactions on what is socially acceptable, “as terrible as that sounds.” He noted that when I asked him the question via e-mail, I spelled out the anti-gay slur, but not the other two words.
Good point.
My question was unfair — I’ve found in my own reporting that debates over single words or phrases are difficult but often important to have in a newsroom, and that the best strategy is to get a wide range of perspectives that consider the larger context of that word. Maybe Sarah Palin could have taken that advice before creating her own controversy over describing the media’s critiques of her as a “blood libel.”
Perri said she also suggested to The Eagle staffers that they might want to spend more time with the members of Westboro Baptist Church than a typical “stand-on-the-corner” protest story — not in an effort to make them appear sympathetic, but to understand what motivates them and let readers see the flaws in their logic.
“Unfortunately the Westboro Baptist Church is so consistently outrageous that people are still fascinated by them,” Szold said. “They have, in a sense, beat the system.”
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