By Sophie Foster
Opinion Editor
On-campus response to a protest that transpired on Sept. 7 continues to be predictably mixed — but off-campus response is where much of the true contention seems to be living.
Key local news outlet, the Kent County News, shared an article regarding the demonstration, which was held in response to a homophobic and transphobic speaker on campus, on Sept. 14. Titling the piece “Protesters silence renowned speaker at Washington College,” KCN elected to pass this article off not as opinion, but as news. This call is perplexing at best.
It is, ultimately, the language that presents cause for concern. Simple diction choices such as “silence” and “renowned” in the headline alone paint a biased portrait. Word choice is doing more work than context is to convince the publication’s readership that LGBTQ+ students were engaged in an endeavor of censorship while an objectively commendable speaker delivered valuable remarks.
The article progresses in its selective citations of the incident, painting protesters as erratic, supportive staff as enablers, and speaker Dr. Robert George as a reasonable victim of an uprising few.
“[I]f they were trying to garner sympathy,” the article said, “it had an opposite effect among some in the crowd.”
The article, not adequately classified as the opinion piece it truly was, had an agenda that would be evident to anyone with context. However, for town residents disconnected from the incident, it would certainly, tactfully, and evocatively construct a conceptualization of the WC student body as troublemaking and disruptive. This feeds into the long-standing disconnect between the College’s students and the town.
Meanwhile, fellow news and media outlet The Chestertown Spy allowed another two cents to be dropped into this rapidly filling pail of misinformation — though this piece, at least, was accurately labeled as a “point of view” article.
The article, titled “Tyranny of the Loud at Washington College … Now What?” writes of “great shock and even greater sadness.”
Written by a resident of Easton, Md. rather than Chestertown itself, this article was also apparently uninterested in garnering perspective from contributing students. Instead, it leaned into the popular tokenism-oriented move of emphasizing Dr. George’s friendship with philosopher Cornel West — a man who is neither gay nor transgender.
While KCN indicated that Dr. George “has lectured at Yale, Harvard, and recently Oklahoma State, all without incident,” The Spy argued near-oppositely, that he is “[n]o stranger to threats of bodily harm…[and] was once targeted with death threats for his views on abortion.”
This claim was immediately followed with the belief that Dr. George was treated “[e]xtremely poorly” at WC, implying an alignment of protesting students with those supposed death threats. To be clear: no threats of physical violence were made by protesters at WC.
The Spy’s article wants the town to be afraid of vocality. It made a concerted endeavor to convince its audience that “there is no reason to believe the protestors will not do it again with anyone who does not embrace their views or asks them to consider other views.”
The article pulls quotes with vague attributions, makes claims without evidence, and constructs arguments from an entirely outside perspective. Regardless, if the article’s comment section is any indication, the agenda was well-received by its target audience: calls for mass expulsion, for example, found their footing in response to its perspective.
According to the protest’s organizer, neither KCN nor The Spy were in contact during or after the protest for comment. Apparently, the only sources contacted were those standing in direct opposition to protesters’ interests. In fact, the only students cited in either article are selectively referenced while mid-protest rather than explicitly interviewed, thus painting them in a more intense light than sources who delivered practiced, planned remarks.
Even as student journalists, writers for The Elm are expected to adhere strictly to the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. Among other expectations, this code asks reporters to “take responsibility for the accuracy of their work[,] verify information before releasing it[, and u]se original sources whenever possible.”
The SPJ Code of Ethics calls for “provid[ing] context [and taking] special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing[,] or summarizing a story.” Effective journalism is supposed to “seek truth and report it” and “minimize harm.”
Both KCN and The Spy failed to embody a mission undergraduate students at WC would be penalized for ignoring. In doing so, they contributed to the perpetuation of turbulence between the town and the College’s students. Reportage like this is both reckless and irresponsible, and both publications owe their audiences clarifications and deeper attentivity moving forward.
Writers referenced in this article were unavailable or did not immediately respond to The Elm’s request for comment.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Photo Caption: Relations between the town and students at the College have long been complicated.