A day after University of Missouri President Tim Wolfe resigned from his position in the face of mass protests, there are still plenty of questions about the University response and diversity and inclusion. There is also plenty to learn about the protesters, the history of activism at Mizzou, and about the social climate at the school. There are layers to the story, and the role of journalism is to peel back these layers and tell the stories. But now, part of the story has become about journalists themselves.
A video of protesters clashing with student photojournalist Tim Tai became fodder for journalists and free speech activists Monday evening. In the video (below), an adult woman who may be a faculty member is seen blocking Tai, denying him access, and threatening March Schierbecker, the person who captured the video, with “muscle.”
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This incident plus media silence from protesters and tweets from Concerned Citizen 1950 has created a new media narrative where journalists become wounded First Amendment-protected victims of self-righteous, coddled protesters. And this single, regrettable incident has become the key piece of evidence for many arguments that nasty protesters are stopping journalists from doing their jobs. A Tweet from Schierbecker outlines that argument quite well.
Do we know how true this claim is globally? It seems even the New York Times can only report from the case of this single video, six minutes of a handful of interactions in a massive and complex series of protests with multiple allied groups of protesters. The claim that protesters are denying journalists the ability to do their jobs also belies the fact that several articles have been published and likely will be published today with firsthand quotes from protesters on the scene.
But are journalists’ First Amendment rights being intentionally interfered with by protesters as policy beyond the horizon of the video? Does a “no media” sign on a lawn in a public area actually restrain media from exercising their rights? Do Tweets from the protest group demanding that white journalists respect black spaces constitute the revocation of freedom of the press? Is this authoritarianism, political correctness, or just a bunch of people who don’t want to talk yet?
According to some reporters on the scene, protesters asked them to stay outside of the perimeter unless allowed in or they would not be allowed access to interviews, requests that journalists seem to have voluntarily agreed to en masse. That hardly qualifies as a wholesale revocation of rights, but more as a common arrangement whereby journalists agree to ethical reporting parameters and are rewarded with trust. There may well have been other incidents of protesters pushing reporters out. This writer makes no claim to omniscience. But as far as I’ve seen those other incidents have not yet been reported.
Perhaps we can be critical of the video and the people in it without jumping to conclusions or making grandstanding claims of censorship or authoritarianism on behalf of the wide coalition of campus actors. Journalism is a key to unlocking the truth, but there are spaces when ethics trump the most dogged pursuit of that truth or even where ethics are the only way to reveal that truth. I imagine that some of the goals of protesters and journalists are broadly aligned in telling the untold stories, and I am sure that protesters and journalists there are interested in finding ways to work together.