PressEthic

A few days ago Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist appeared at Columbia University to deliver a speech on illegal immigration. Rather than allow him to express his views, the audience shouted him down.

Then several audience members stormed the stage, trashing it and forcing Gilchrist to flee. (The New York Sun has coverage here, the LA Times here.)

Columbia President Lee Bollinger sums up my feelings on the substance of the matter:

...we must speak out to deplore a disruption that threatens the central principle to which we are institutionally dedicated, namely to respect the rights of others to express their views.

This is not complicated: Students and faculty have rights to invite speakers to the campus. Others have rights to hear them. Those who wish to protest have rights to do so. No one, however, shall have the right or the power to use the cover of protest to silence speakers. This is a sacrosanct and inviolable principle.

It is unacceptable to seek to deprive another person of his or her right of expression through actions such as taking a stage and interrupting the speech. We rightly have a visceral rejection of this behavior, because we all sense how easy it is to slide from our collective commitment to the hard work of intellectual confrontation to the easy path of physical brutishness. When the latter happens, we know instinctively we are all threatened.

Obviously I think this story deserves media attention. However, most networks have underplayed the story, while FOX News has used its talking heads shows Hannity and Colmes and The O'Reilly Factor to conduct segments I won't dignify with the word "discussion" or "interview".

The most comprehensive coverage I've seen -- the best place to go if you really want to find out what happened -- turns out to be a blog run by Columbia's student newspaper. (They've even got streaming video of the Fox News appearances -- you've got to see them to believe them.) Is it biased? Of course. Do they provide lots of raw information and perspective that no one else does? Yep.

I've long thought that as a beat reporter I could better inform readers about a story with a blog than column inches in the print newspaper, both due to the constraints of the conventions of newswriting and the unlimited space available Online.

In this controversy, I pronounce the blogs victorious, and the cable networks and anti-free speech students the losers.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse posts a video I hadn't seen before. One of the most disturbing things it depicts is what sounds like a significant portion of the crowd cheering the actions of those who stormed the stage.