College editors turn journalism into cuddly kumbaya

At issue was the newspaper’s coverage of protests against a speech on campus last week by former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Demonstrators made clear they were protesting not just the content of his remarks on policies, but the very fact that he had been invited to speak on campus.

Naturally, the student daily covered the speech and the protests. Later, though, its editors apparently felt bad that covering protests actually meant covering the protesters.

Here’s how the Daily’s apology, published Nov. 10, put it: “We recognize that we contributed to the harm students experienced, and we wanted to apologize. … One area of our reporting that harmed many students was our photo coverage of the event. Some protesters found photos posted to reporters’ Twitter accounts retraumatizing and invasive. Those photos have since been taken down.”

Let’s hit the pause button. Students involved in a public protest trying to shut down the free speech of a former major U.S. government figure are here portrayed as not just traumatized, but “retraumatized” by seeing photos of themselves at their own protest. Reminders of their public actions in a public space are not just invasive but actually do “harm.”

Forget what this says about how crazily oversensitive they are; this “reasoning” is to logic what funhouse mirrors are to visual perspective. The distortion of reality is severe.

The newspaper’s abject and overwrought apology continued, at much greater length:

They added, most absurdly, “Some students also voiced concern about the methods that Daily staffers used to reach out to them. Some of our staff members who were covering the event used Northwestern’s directory to obtain phone numbers for students beforehand and texted them to ask if they’d be willing to be interviewed. We recognize being contacted like this is an invasion of privacy.”

In the real world, using public sources such as phone books to track down sources is not just basic journalism, but elementary common sense. Here, the reporters took the extra courtesy of texting beforehand to ask consent to call. It was if the reporters were playing the game “Mother, May I?,” asking permission before taking a single step forward.

To subject fellow students to having electronic text show up on their publicly listed phones, to ask permission for an actual voice conversation, is hardly an “invasion of privacy.” What’s next — bathers at a public nude beach complaining that people saw them naked?

Finally, the newspaper apologized for actually publishing protesters’ names. Editors explained they should have protected the anonymity of public protesters against potential disciplinary action by university administrators because Northwestern features “a student body that can be very easily and directly hurt by the University.”

Spare us your pity party. These editors, and the students they illy serve by pathetically coddling them, need to step out into the real world. Right now, they are practicing not journalism, but unlicensed public therapy. Worse, it’s therapy of the sort that doesn’t help patients or students overcome unwarranted fears, but instead makes them even easier prey to childish paranoia.