Is Seeking Comment a Journalistic Crime? At Harvard, Some Say Yes

Amanda Y. Su, The Harvard Crimson

Are critics of The Harvard Crimson’s coverage of an anti-ICE rally “horrendously shortsighted” in objecting to the newspaper’s seeking comment from the government agency? Or are they responding to shifting norms in the public’s perception of a federal administration egregiously hostile to immigrants and foreigners?

Students circulating and signing a petition are outraged that the university’s daily student newspaper last month sought comment from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement about an anti-ICE rally that had already occurred. As of Wednesday afternoon, Act on a Dream, the Harvard group that organized the September 12 rally, and 10 other groups had gathered 678 signatures on a petition demanding “Harvard: Stop Calling ICE for Comment.”

That number should be adjusted down by at least one, however, since a signer, Jeremy McLeod of Atlanta, wrote that he was “signing this ironically, because this is the dumbest goddamn petition I’ve ever seen. What the hell is wrong with asking any group, regardless of their position, for a simple comment for a newspaper?”

But for Act on a Dream, ICE isn’t just any government agency. It’s one that has been targeting activists who receive public attention. Act on a Dream didn’t respond to an email request for comment. But in the petition, it writes:

“We are extremely disappointed in the cultural insensitivity displayed by the Crimson’s policy to reach out to ICE, a government agency with a long history of surveilling and retaliating against those who speak out against them. Here are just a few examples. In this political climate, a request for comment is virtually the same as tipping them off, regardless of how they are contacted.”

The petition demands that the Crimson “apologize for the harm they inflicted on the undocumented community, critically engage with and change their policies that require calling ICE for comment,” and “declare their commitment to protecting undocumented students on campus.”

Isabel Giovannetti, vice president of the Harvard College Democrats, one of the groups that signed the petition, said that the fact that the Crimson contacted ICE after the protest doesn’t make a difference in terms of the threats ICE poses to student activists. By seeking ICE comment, she said, the paper called attention to the protest and to particular participants.

“They are being helpful to ICE, and that is very problematic,” Giovannetti said. “ICE perpetuates violence and security threats against the people in this community. … This isn’t just a regular government agency.”

If students interviewed by the Crimson had known that it would contact ICE for comment, she said, they might not have spoken with reporters. Because they didn’t know, “they were not afforded that choice.”

In a note to readers, the Crimson’s president, Kristine E. Guillaume, and its managing editor, Angela N. Fu, counter that foremost among commonly accepted journalistic standards is “the belief that every party named in a story has a right to comment or contest criticism leveled against them.”

“In the Crimson’s communication with ICE’s media office,” the editors note, “the reporters did not provide the names or immigration statuses of any individual at the protest. We did not give ICE forewarning of the protest, nor did we seek to interfere with the protest as it was occurring. Indeed, it is the Crimson’s practice to wait until a protest concludes before asking for comment from the target of the protest — a rule which was followed here.”

Reached by email, Guillaume said that the Crimson did not wish to comment beyond the editors’ written statement.

‘A Fundamental Misunderstanding’

“The Crimson’s actions here are exemplary,” Geneva Overholser, former director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a longtime journalist, wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “I’d urge the critics to think about how well a news outlet that reported only popular voices would serve their information needs. And I wonder if these critics can hear, in their anger against the press, the echoes of Trump’s rants.”

Sanford J. Ungar, director of the Free Speech Project at Georgetown University, teaches seminars on the topic at both Georgetown and Harvard. A former associate managing editor of the Crimson, he said he had heard there is dissent within the paper about how the anti-ICE rally was covered.

He thinks the petitioners are misguided in that they seem to believe “that their issues are so important and their defense of them so articulate that if they just persist, everyone else will change their mind and they will prevail. It just doesn’t work that way.”

But, he said, ICE has a grim reputation unlike other government agencies. Comparisons between ICE and the Gestapo, he said, “may sound extreme, but picking up people because of who they are and appear to be, and this fear that they’ll drop in anywhere anytime and carry people off — children without parents — it is pretty extreme.”

Ted Gup, a journalist, author, journalism professor at the University at Albany, and occasional contributor to The Chronicle Review, called the petitioners’ position “horrendously shortsighted.”

Given the stream of false and misleading claims emanating from the Trump administration, it’s understandable, Gup said, that students would be wary of official responses. “The orthodoxies of the press itself,” he said, “have undergone change in recent years” — for instance, coming straight out and calling the president a liar.

But the petition “shows a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy,” he said. “They should all read John Stuart Mill on dissent.”

Joseph Weber, a longtime journalist and an associate professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, said he was “very sensitive to the idea of false balance,” as in quoting two climate-change deniers to counter every two climate-change explainers when there is an almost complete consensus on the matter.

But to try to block routine comment from a government agency that is being accused of immoral behavior hits the other extreme, he said. Readers can decide that a government comment or protesters’ chants are hooey. But that is the prerogative of the reader, not the reporter. “We are media, which means we are between,” he said. “We are not advocates.”

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard and a former adviser to the Crimson, thinks the situation can be illuminated by looking at the journalism historian Daniel C. Hallin’s theory of spheres.

Hallin, Benton explained, looked at media objectivity in light of coverage of the Vietnam War. He theorized that any given idea or topic falls within one of three spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, or deviance. The sphere of legitimate controversy, Benton said, is, at any moment, shifting ground. Free college, same-sex marriage, and banning Muslims from the country were all, just a decade or two ago, considered “pretty out there.” Journalists, politicians, and activists have now brought those ideas into the political mainstream, even if they are still contentious.

The petitioners, Benton speculated, “believe that ICE is a deviant enough institution that it doesn’t deserve the right of response. Most journalists would agree with me that that’s not correct.” And he would argue that the petitioners have “gotten ahead of themselves in this case.”

But he finds it “absolutely appropriate” that journalists and readers are arguing over these issues.

“In this case, I think the news organization got it right,” he said, “but these debates are going to continue.”

Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.