On Nov. 5, when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was scheduled to give a lecture on the Evanston campus of Northwestern University in Illinois on “The Real Meaning of the Trump Agenda,” student protesters gathered outside and banged on windows, chanting “F--k Jeff Sessions!” Some managed to force their way inside, where they were removed by university police.
We got that account from the news service run by Medill, the premier journalism school at Northwestern. The university also has a newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, many of whose staffers are Northwestern journalism students. The paper also covered the Sessions protests, dutifully and unremarkably in a Nov. 6 article. And that’s when the real protests began.
The Daily’s editors “were beat into submission by ... vitriol and relentless public shaming” from the protesters, said Medill Dean Charles Whitaker in a prepared statement – until the editors removed the name of one student protester from the article and agreed to publicly apologize for just about everything in a Nov. 10 editorial.
The editorial left observers ruing the day the students graduate and get jobs in the news media, which could be shortly. It began: “Last week, The Daily was not the paper that Northwestern students deserve” – and went downhill from there:
“While our goal is to document history and spread information, nothing is more important than ensuring that our fellow students feel safe – and in situations like this, that they are benefiting from our coverage rather than being actively harmed by it. We failed to do that last week, and we could not be more sorry.”
Whitaker called that “not well considered.” More typical was the reaction at the libertarian site Reason, which called it “sniveling” and “embarrassing.”
Whitaker has it right: When false confessions are obtained by torture, surely they are not well considered, but by the same token, they should not be embarrassing. Sooner or later, everybody breaks.
We should not worry too much about how the student journalists will make it in the all-grown-up world of journalism as long as there are any mentors left. It is the browbeaters who concern us.
One day soon they too will leave their campuses, flush with victory, thinking they can compel everyone else to make the world safe for them.
There is a hoary tale about the Romanovs, Nicholas and Alexandra, the last tsar and tsarina of Russia. Their young son Alexei, heir to the throne, was a hemophiliac. It was important to his parents that they keep this a secret from the Russian people, as it implied impurity in royal bloodlines.
Alexandra desperately wanted to keep Alexei from so much as scratching himself while still letting him seem to have a normal life. So that Alexei might play in the Peterhof Palace gardens, servants were ordered to cover all the many shrubs and hedgerows with bedspreads.
The servants grumbled at their mad task. They knew perfectly well what was wrong, and resented the privilege and prerogatives of these people – who would soon find themselves put to death in the Russian revolution for being politically incorrect themselves.
These protesters at Northwestern are like tsars in a bubble.
Lately, you will sometimes see a news account that says someone “passed” instead of saying a person died, which is the plain English for it.
We are all going to die. It is not the point of the news to hide such important information from you out of a misplaced sensitivity to illusions of immortality, any more than Northwestern’s Daily should try to protect the student protesters from their worst selves.
