Re: Re Horowitz article

>>>>> "greg" == Greg Konig <[email protected]> writes:


[At the risk of stepping on Bijan's toes, I'll wade in gingerly here.]

  greg> First point: Although we can disagree about whether ads by
  greg> "monied interests" are right or not, my point was that if a
  greg> paper is going to accept them at all, they should make a point
  greg> to be impartial about which ones they accept.  The tone and
  greg> point of the ad should be irrelevant.  It is a fact that many
  greg> (I'll bet most of them accept editorial ads of one kind or
  greg> another) of these papers are hypocritical if they accept some
  greg> editorials but not others.

Why does a publisher have to ignore the tone and point of an ad? I'm
the publisher of Monkeyfist.com. We consider it to be an online
magazine. Why is it hypocritical of me to take money for ads for, say,
products and services I think are good and not take money for ads for
products and services I think are bad?

Examples: I'd run ads for The Nation or for Amy's Vegetarian frozen
foods; I wouldn't run ads for Playboy or Ford or Phillip Morris. Am I
a hypocrite?

Let's take editorials that pretend to be ads. I don't think that the
general practice is sensible *at all*; in fact, I think running any ad
that's really an editorial that you wouldn't run *as* an editorial is
a distortion of the point of journalism, but let's pretend I think
otherwise.

Let's pretend I think editorials as ads are *just* ads. Now, why can't
I run the ones that I think are good -- say one about how the
corporate media systematically distorts the Israel-Palestine issue in
favor of Palestinians -- and decline to run the ones that I think are
bad (in whatever sense: inaccurate, offensive, distortive,
inflammatory) -- say one that claims that black Americans should be
grateful to slave traders for bringing their ancestors to America.

Where's the hypocrisy? I'm uniformly applying a principled standard: I
publish things that I think are good (for some value of good) and I
don't publish things that I think are bad (for some value of bad).

  greg> Why should he give lectures on campus about reparation when he
  greg> can reach a much broader audience by submitting an ad?  That
  greg> would be stupid.

Because if he's at all interested, as he and his supporters claim, in
the free *exchange of ideas* then he wants to *listen* as much as he
wants to *talk* about reparations.

University lectures ordinarily feature things like question and answer
sessions -- which Horowitz is notoriously prone to blow off in snits
of pique -- visits and smaller lectures to relevant classes, seminars,
campus groups, community leaders, etc.

Universities are communities of inquiry in which a Good Actor has many
chances to present her ideas and, reciprocally, listen to the
different ideas of others, including good faith criticism.

Buying an ad in a campus-affiliated paper, an ad that contains obvious
falsehoods, inflammatory fighting words, and gross distortions of the
truth, is the merest simulacrum of the free exchange of ideas. It's
the equivalent of throwing a rock through someone's window upon which
is scrawled the message 'you suck!'.

The only hypocrites I can see are editors who refuse to run
Holocaust-denial ads on the grounds that either 1) they contain gross
falsehoods or 2) are inflammatory, but then turn around and run
Horowitz's ad, which should be rejected on the same grounds. Count
among that group the editor of University of Wisconsin-Madison's
paper, Georgetown's, Brown's, and a host of others.

If an editor or publisher claims, as I do, that they run good stuff
they agree with and don't run bad stuff they don't, and, further, they
turned down the Holocaust-denial ad but ran Horowitz's, *then* they
aren't hypocrites, they are moral imbeciles.

That is, hypocrisy isn't the only way of failing morally in this
context.

  greg> Seriously, if a bunch of drunk white frat boys ran around
  greg> trashing papers one morning because of a negative article on
  greg> binge drinking, there would be a concerted effort to track
  greg> them down and punish them.  

Would there be? Not on any university campus I've been on, where
drunken white frat boys seem for the most part "livin' large and in
charge" -- have you ever heard the things they yell at Take Back the
Night marches?

We generally distinguish between mere vandalism and symbolic or
political speech by means of vandalism. *If* the frat boys did their
thing in such a way as to make clear that they were protesting,
politically, the articles about binge drinking, their actions should
be looked at in a different light than if they, in further acts of
drunken stupidity, broke into the paper's office and vandalized
equipment. But even if they took a bunch of papers in a fit of
drunken, apolitical rage, it still wouldn't be theft.

(Remember U Colorado students starting a full on riot, burning police
cars and throwing rocks, when UC decided to ban on-campus alcohol
sales? Do you seriously think the reaction would be the same if a
black fraternity protested Horowitz's ad in the same way? Please.)

Kendall Clark