The dean of one of the most prominent journalism schools in the country defended the student newspaper after it apologized for its coverage of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s campus visit but said the apology sent “a chilling message about journalism and its role in society.”
Charles Whitaker, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, said the apology was “well-intentioned gesture,” but it showed that journalists “are prone to bowing to the loudest and most influential voices in our orbit.”
The Daily Northwestern was criticized by student activists after it sent a reporter to cover Sessions’s recent address to the College Republicans and another reporter to cover the activists who were protesting the speech in objection to the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants.
Leaders of the Daily Northwestern said Saturday that their coverage “harmed” students because it included photos of the protest that protesters found “retraumatizing and invasive.” Staffers also apologized for the way they contacted students — by using a school directory to find their phone numbers and text them to ask if they would be willing to be interviewed.
“We recognize being contacted like this is an invasion of privacy,” the paper said in a lengthy editorial.
Whitaker said the paper’s coverage “was in no way beyond the bounds of fair, responsible journalism” and accused the student activists of “vicious bullying and badgering.”
“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,” he said in a statement Tuesday. “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.”
He continued, “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.”
