PressEthic

There are bigoted people on both sides of the political spectrum - bigotry and hatred are not the exclusive domains of one political party. And though I don’t have any statistics to back me up, I assume (I know, a dangerous thing to do) that most people tend to be towards the middle of the spectrum. But somehow, we always seem to hear the opinions of the fringe. Why is that? Why is it that the extremists are the ones who are willing to scream loud and long until someone listens to them?

Take, for example, the discussion that our very own Laura Grow sparked with her blog post about racial profiling. Though people have varying points to make about Islam and its role in terrorism, it seemed that only “Mike” was willing to equate Muslim with terrorists. And though there were several people, both from our class and others from the web, tried to talk to him reasonably and rationally (including myself), but he just kept coming back – and it seems he’s going to have the final word. There were so many of us who were trying to argue against him, and we all decided to stop. Are we ignoring him, and hoping he goes away? Are we saying his arguments are not worth the effort of arguing against them? Are some of us (gasp) convinced by his arguments?

The pattern here though, is the same type of pattern that we see everywhere – reasonable people (note that I don’t mean liberals, or people with the same opinions as me) try to talk extremists down, and eventually have to admit defeat. “Mike” was one person who was willing to sit on this board and counter any arguments made by anyone else. And there were seven other people in the same discussion who weren’t and didn’t.

Should we as journalists pay attention to him and his obviously faulty arguments? Should the media pay any attention to people like him? Is it out job, our duty as objective reporters, to give credence and time to these opinions? I don’t know. I’d like to say no, but that’s a purely biased answer. It might be worth thinking about. Does it serve objectivity to give the same amount of attention to all people and opinions, even when they’re so racist and inflammatory? Or is this one case where objectivity actually goes against the purpose of journalism?