People on the left and the right spin facts to fall in their favor. But today, Rabbi Daniel Lapin goes to new heights of stretching the truth to prove a point that, at its heart, I actually agree with. His basic assertion is that people shouldn’t be punished for expressing their views — which is generally true, but what he seems to ignore in his examples is that many of these people used their job as a platform to express their person beliefs, in ways that were sometimes unethical, irresponsible and contrary to their duties.
Austria has just sentenced an eccentric, obsessed historian to jail for three years because he expressed his opinion that Auschwitz didn’t have gas chambers. David Irving violated Austria’s law which provides for up to 10 years imprisonment for Holocaust deniers. It is ironic that many of the people cheering this suppression of free speech in Austria are the same people decrying Muslim attempts to do the same in Denmark.
Even on this side of the Atlantic, people are paying a heavy price for expressing their views. Harvard University’s president, Lawrence Summers, was just forced to resign, essentially for suggesting that it might be worth studying whether innate differences would explain why fewer women than men succeed in math and science. Professor Alan Dershowitz rightly called the affair an academic coup d’etat.
Spoken like someone who has no idea as to what went on at Harvard, and thinks it’s easier to blame the feminists than to look at the whole issue. Summers resigned because his faculty had long-standing problems with him, the least of which were his comments on gender. Perhaps there will be a post on this later, but read just about any news article and you’ll see what I mean. As for Austria’s jailing of a Holocaust denier, I agree with Lapin that such a punishment is a ridiculous infringement on free speech; I just don’t know where he got the idea that “many of the people cheering this suppression of free speech in Austria are the same people decrying Muslim attempts to do the same in Denmark.” I haven’t heard anyone cheer the suppression of free speech in Austria. But perhaps the Rabbi and I run in different crowds.
But the biggest, most egregious spin-doctoring was this:
In the Wall Street Journal, writer Dawn Eden describes how the New York Post fired her after several warnings concerning her beliefs as a Christian conservative. The paper said Miss Eden possessed “rabid anti-abortion views.”
Now, if someone was fired from the Post simply because they were a Christian, I’d be outraged. But Dawn wasn’t fired for her beliefs; she was fired because she violated the ethical responsibilities required of her position.
Some background:
The New York Post is a notoriously conservative Murdoch-owned tabloid in New York City. It has some of the lowest ethical standards of any newspaper out there, and its “journalism” is remarkably poor. I was a journalism major at NYU, and in our classes we’d often go over the city dailies — and we were warned by many professors that should we go on to work for the Post, we would probably never be hired at any non-Murdoch publication, because the Post teaches you such bad journalistic habits. This is the paper that, on its cover, superimposed weasel heads onto the bodies of UN members, and refers to the United Nations as “Euro-weasels.” We are not talking about high standards here. It’s not easy to get fired from the Post for lacking ethics.
Dawn worked for the Post as a copy editor and headline writer. Her job was, as one would assume, to write headlines, edit copy, and flag factual errors. One night, she was given a story to copy edit. It was about a woman with terminal cancer who went through in vitro fertilization because she wanted to have children.
According to Ms. Eden, she was repelled by what she interpreted as a “cavalier” attitude about the embryos in Ms. Edelman’s story: “Treating them as a manufactured commodity that don’t have significance as human life,” Ms. Eden said. (Ms. Edelman declined to comment when reached by The Observer.)
“I got choked up,” Ms. Eden said. “How are people going to ever understand the complex issues involved here, if the story they’re reading reduces it to ‘Oh, isn’t this nice? We can just make lots of embryos and not worry about whether they live or die.’”
Which is understandable. As a copy editor, you’re going to read stories that occassionally upset you, or that you don’t like — but your job is to edit the copy for grammar, syntax, etc, not to inject your own beliefs into the story. Dawn didn’t follow this simple rule.
Ms. Eden read a line in the draft of the story: “Experts have ethical qualms about this ‘Russian roulette’ path to parenthood.” She saw her opportunity: She added a phrase: ” … which, when in-vitro fertilization is involved, routinely results in the destruction of embryos.” And where Ms. Edelman had written that one woman had three embryos implanted “and two took,” Ms. Eden changed that to read: “One died. Two took.”
Ms. Eden said she thought she was performing a service for the reader, since she believed that the Post had been “notoriously oblivious” to the nuances involving embryonic life.
That isn’t copy editing, that’s editorializing. If I was a copy editor at, say, the New York Daily News (also a conservative city tabloid, slightly more reputable than the Post) and in editing a story about abortion I deleted every reference to “pro-life” and substituted “anti-choice,” then took a sentence which said, “Many pro-choice groups oppose the latest legislation in South Dakota to outlaw abortion” and changed it to “Many pro-choice groups oppose the latest legislation in South Dakota to outlaw abortion, because it will almost inevitably result in women dying and being maimed by illegal procedures,” I just overstepped the ethical boundaries of my job. I might believe that everything I just wrote is correct, and I might believe that it should have been in the article in the first place because leaving it out does the reader a huge disservice — in fact, I do believe that. But I should still not be trusted with future copy. It’s not my name on the byline. Whatever gets printed in the paper will be attached to that reporter for the rest of her career; as a professional, it’s up to her, her section editors and the editor-in-chief to decide what gets printed. Copy editors are the last set of eyes to examine a story, and their job is not to change its content.
Dawn was fired for violating the ethical responsibilities of her job, and for blogging at work. It’s clear that that’s what she did. One could argue that firing her was too harsh, that she should simply have been reprimanded and put on probation. That’s fine. But Dawn and her supporters aren’t asserting that — they’re taking the position that she did nothing wrong. Which doesn’t bode well for the future of journalism and ethical standards.
I should add in here that I’ve worked as an editor, a copy editor, a reporter and a columnist in a variety of settings — at a university paper, at an online news source, at a radio station, and at a magazine. There are clear lines which you don’t cross in each position. I’ve had to edit pieces that I didn’t agree with, where I felt that the presentation of the facts wasn’t in line with my own beliefs — but I recognized the importance in not changing what the writer was actually saying. At the Washington Square News, we employed one particular fact-checker/copy editor whose political views were very far to the left, and who often took issue with things written by my former editor and occassional Feministe commenter, Shankar. If he thought Shankar got something wrong, he’d point it out. But he never took Shankar’s writing and substituted his own beliefs into it. Or, as Shankar says, “He never changed any of my columns to reflect his own commie opinions. :-). And he was always respectful when bringing up issues and concerns, and on a few occasions, he ended up making the column better. Thus strengthening the vast right-wing conspiracy. Fool.” (Shankar would like me to be clear that this copy editor is not actually a commie, or a fool).
Long story short, copy editors and fact checkers can use their moral compasses to push the reporters in a different direction, and to encourage them to think about issues more broadly. In doing this, they do their jobs well, and they make the paper itself better. They don’t make anything better by editorializing in news content.
As an editor, a reporter, a columnist and a human being, I’ve screwed up a bunch of times. We all make mistakes. You all have certainly seen me make them here. I made them as a columnist. I made them as an editor. So I’m not trying to demonize Dawn here, even though what I think she did was thoroughly unethical and wrong. People fuck up, especially when it comes to dealing with issues that get us worked up. But the problem here is that, as far as I can tell, Dawn hasn’t owned her mistake — instead, she’s cried Christian persecution, and others, like Rabbi Lapin, have followed. It demonstrates not only deep immaturity and narcissism, but a stunning lack of ethical and moral understanding — not to mention a total ignorance of what terms like “freedom of speech” actually mean. Lapin writes,
I am suggesting that the thoughtful among us ought vigorously to oppose all attempts at policing thoughts and beliefs. Freedom of belief and speech is a good idea even if we find some beliefs and speech disgusting.
I agree. But freedom of belief and speech doesn’t extend to the freedom to put your beliefs under someone else’s name without consequences.
No one supressed Dawn’s ideas. No one shut down her blog, or refused to let her speak her mind, or fired her because they didn’t like the cross around her neck. She was fired because she misused company time, and because she broke the ethical code of her position. She has since been hired by the New York Daily News as an opinion writer and has a book about chastity on the way, so this incident didn’t exactly silence her. It’s nonetheless disturbing that a working journalist refuses to admit when she engages in an ethical breach, and when others use her as an example of the persecuted. It makes their argument all the weaker, and sheds light on the lengths to which some of them will go in order to convince others that they’re unfairly targeted.