The ripples from that notorious four-word “editorial” in the Colorado State University student newspaper are still rippling. It has refueled the constant debate between free-speech rights and ethical responsibilities, and it raises at least a couple of political questions.
The CSU flap was mentioned prominently last weekend at a journalism conference in Washington, D.C. During the week that followed, the CSU College Republicans launched their own student publication. And a CSU student who called me a few days later, seeking donations for the journalism school, asked me what I thought about the editorial.
Not much, I said. It was sensational, sophomoric and silly. It was illogical and irrelevant to the incident that sparked it, the Tasering of a disruptive and immature student at a John Kerry event in Florida. If the editor of the Collegian, J. David McSwane, wants to get a job in serious journalism, he needs to be more thoughtful and responsible. (I actually didn’t say all that, but it’s what I meant when I said “Not much.”)
He said he was a journalism major specializing in public relations and, from a PR standpoint, it certainly was not a good thing for the newspaper or the school.
Decades ago, I was the editor of that newspaper. I was, as
McSwane is now, only 20 years old. We did some silly things, and the college president raised a couple of questions about editorials I had written, but we never ran any four-word editorials containing foul four-letter words.
McSwane kept his job. The Board of Student Communications had five options: to fire him, suspend, reprimand or admonish him, or to drop the thing. Firing would have been an inappropriate overreaction. The board was right to admonish McSwane for “unethical and unprofessional” conduct, and he’d be smart to humbly acknowledge that.
Some of McSwane’s defenders have argued, “If Dick Cheney can get away with saying the same word on the Senate floor, what’s so bad about a student journalist publishing it in a newspaper?”
That’s nonsense. Dick Cheney didn’t “get away with it.” His use of the f-word made a disproportionate amount of news. And he didn’t intend to make it public in the way that someone publishing an editorial does.
The more substantial liberal complaint is that the CSU flap was blown out of proportion because it attacked a conservative target. A similar situation at Central Connecticut State University involved a subject that offends liberal sensibilities, and it didn’t get nearly as much attention.
On Sept. 12, nine days before the CSU editorial ran, the CCSU Recorder ran a “comic” strip having to do with keeping a 14-year-old Hispanic girl locked in a closet and urinating on her. In February, the same newspaper had run an opinion piece headlined “Rape only hurts if you fight it.”
Though the Connecticut paper didn’t get talk radio hosts all frothy, it did set off a long e-mail exchange among members of the ethics committee of the Society of Professional Journalists.
It boiled down to this: Without question, the First Amendment gives citizens a legal right to say even the most offensive things. The way to fight speech you don’t like is with more free speech – which is what the CSU Republicans are doing with their new monthly, The Ram Republic.
And just because you can say something doesn’t mean you should. Professionalism requires a more responsible approach. So does the job market.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News. His column appears twice a month.
