The student newspaper of one of the most prominent journalism schools in the country apologized for its coverage of a recent visit to campus by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The Daily Northwestern, the newspaper of Northwestern University, sent a reporter to cover Sessions’s address to the College Republicans and another reporter to cover student activists who objected to the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants, protesting the speech.
In a lengthy editorial on Saturday, the leaders of the newspaper said their coverage “harmed” students because it included photos of the protest.
“Some protesters found photos posted to reporters’ Twitter accounts retraumatizing and invasive. Those photos have since been taken down,” the paper said. “While our goal is to document history and spread information, nothing is more important than ensuring that our fellow students feel safe — and in situations like this, that they are benefiting from our coverage rather than being actively harmed by it. We failed to do that last week, and we could not be more sorry.”
Daily Northwestern staffers said they regretted initially quoting a protester by name because of the potential for the university to retaliate against the activist.
“Any information The Daily provides about the protest can be used against the participating students — while some universities grant amnesty to student protesters, Northwestern does not. We did not want to play a role in any disciplinary action that could be taken by the University. Some students have also faced threats for being sources in articles published by other outlets. When the source in our article requested their name be removed, we chose to respect the student’s concerns for their privacy and safety,” the editorial said.
The paper said students were also concerned about the way staffers reached out to them — by using a school directory to find their phone numbers and text them to ask if they would be willing to be interviewed, a common practice of professional journalists.
“We recognize being contacted like this is an invasion of privacy, and we’ve spoken with those reporters — along with our entire staff — about the correct way to reach out to students for stories,” the paper said.
UPDATE: Charles Whitaker, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, defended the paper’s initial reporting in a statement later on Tuesday and accused the student activists of “vicious bullying and badgering.”
“Let me be perfectly clear, the coverage by The Daily Northwestern of the protests stemming from the recent appearance on campus by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was in no way beyond the bounds of fair, responsible journalism,” Whitaker said. “The Daily Northwestern is an independent, student-run publication. As the dean of Medill, where many of these young journalists are trained, I am deeply troubled by the vicious bullying and badgering that the students responsible for that coverage have endured for the ‘sin’ of doing journalism.”
“I patently reject the notion that our students have no right to report on communities other than those from which they hail, and I will never affirm that students who do not come from marginalized communities cannot understand or accurately convey the struggles of those populations. And, unlike our young charges at The Daily, who in a heartfelt, though not well-considered editorial, apologized for their work on the Sessions story, I absolutely will not apologize for encouraging our students to take on the much-needed and very difficult task of reporting on our life and times at Northwestern and beyond,” he continued.
