In Columbia chaos, student journalists stand tall | Will Bunch Newsletter

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For a few tense moments, the student broadcasters behind Columbia University’s radio station WKCR — who’ve dropped their normal, mostly jazz programming for dramatic live reporting of protests that have rocked their Upper Manhattan campus — must have wondered if they were at an Ivy League university or in the war-torn capital of a banana republic.

At roughly 10:30 p.m. on Saturday night, as tensions were peaking — with student demonstrators pushing the university to divest from Israel over the war in Gaza and defying the Columbia administration’s orders to shut down their campus encampment — school security officers raced into the radio station’s studios and told the on-air staff they would need to leave the building and shut down their broadcast.

As the on-air announcer told the audience — which, thanks to internet streaming, was listening to the protests from all over the world — that shutting down WKCR would be unprecedented, things abruptly changed again. The security officers, apparently seeking to close a cluster of buildings because of a perceived threat, realized taking a radio station off the air would be a mistake — especially at the school that administers journalism’s Pulitzer Prizes.

“That was scary,” a student broadcaster said, her voice shaking (according to a journalist who was listening live), with some nervous laughter behind her. “We’re going to cut to music now!” Buoyed by the realization WKCR still has not been ordered closed in a history that goes back to the primitive days of radio in 1908, the young broadcasters were soon back doing live reports from the protest, reading the latest bulletins from the administration, and airing other vital news for a campus facing its most tumultuous unrest in 56 years.

“Is Columbia in crisis?” asked a headline from the Columbia Spectator student newspaper — in a rare moment of understatement by student journalists. At a time when an ex-U.S. president is facing a criminal trial for the first time, and with Congress breaking a logjam on foreign aid, the campus protests have nevertheless riveted the nation — especially on social media, where students protesting events in the Middle East have touched a string of hot wires around war and peace, religion and prejudice.

The showdown exploded last week after embattled Columbia president Minouche Shafik faced hostile questions in Congress about reported incidents of antisemitism, then ordered the New York Police Department on campus, where officers arrested more than 100 students from the pro-Palestinian tent encampment. The arrests only poured gasoline on the fire. The Biden White House condemned new antisemitic incidents — many on the fringe of campus, not involving students — while many Columbia professors lashed out at an assault on free speech.

In a social-media age when videos from campus — lacking context or the most basic information — can get several million views, factual information from the Columbia campus is essential for fighting this flood of disinformation, some intended and some accidental. Regrettably, both mainstream and professional freelance journalists have struggled amid the chaos and harsh rules from the university to get access to report from the scene.

That’s made student journalists, who have the ID badges needed to get onto campus, even more essential than usual. Thankfully, the young cub reporters for the Spectator, WKCR, and other campus outlets haven’t merely met the challenge. Much of their work as been stellar.

While the denizens of X and other social media sites were yelling back and forth over the severity of antisemitic incidents in and around campus since the encampment began last Wednesday, the reporters at the Spectator, using their on-scene access and doing some shoe-leather reporting, produced a piece that analyzed the alleged incidents, where they occurred and, where possible, who was involved. The story found many — although not all — tirades or threats against Jewish students came from non-students or happened just off campus, but their piece also made it clear why some students feel unsafe, and why the chaos has vexed authorities seeking calm.

Good journalism means actually talking to folks, fact-checking, and setting the record straight, wherever those facts lead — which is exactly what the Spectator’s reporting on antisemitism achieved. But having the best facts can also form the basis for powerful opinion journalism. And while opinions on what’s happening at Columbia, and whether Shafik should resign, are a dime a dozen, the Spectator editorial board used both its journalism and its lived experience at the university to craft a truly powerful defense of the free speech that is currently under attack.

In their “Is Columbia in crisis?” editorial, they wrote: “The administration has ignored our countless pleas to engage meaningfully with students, opting instead to continue down a path of surveillance, oppression, and authoritarian policies. Columbia should encourage free discourse on campus, not censor marginalized voices under the guise of ‘safety’ and protection.”

Academic freedom, free speech, and freedom of the press are essentially first-cousins in the battle for open expression. Shafik has already tried to terrorize students and chill dissent by calling the NYPD onto the Columbia campus — a low moment in an ongoing war against young people’s liberty to speak out. But the fearless reporting and powerful moral stands taken by young people at WKCR and the Spectator are essential reminders of why we need the First Amendment more today than ever.

It once seemed like a relic from 1968 to talk about a “generation gap” in American society, but the still-boiling Israel-Gaza conflict and a new era of campus unrest has brought it back with a vengeance, as get-off-my-lawn boomers complain about the younger generation and its politics. I always believe in our young people, and find their passion for changing the world a welcome break from the cynicism of so-called “grown-ups.” The around-the-clock student journalists at Columbia have only reaffirmed my sense that, despite everything you’ve heard, the kids are alright.

Question: We’re now seeing the horrific effects of red state abortion bans with women being turned away from ERs and bleeding out from miscarriages. Why isn’t Biden using executive power to codify Roe? We sure as hell know Trump will use that power. — Via kayhay (@kuhayden) on X/Twitter

Answer: There’s no question about the imperative to act, not only to preserve reproductive rights, but also basic women’s health in today’s chaotic post-Roe environment. Biden, it should be noted, has taken some administrative steps to advance federal protections for women, such as this August 2022 order aimed at protecting women traveling out-of-state for abortions, among other things. He’s probably looking at more between now and November. But taking action without Congress is always a double-edged sword. Democrats like Biden and Barack Obama faced some understandable blowback for executive orders on issues they couldn’t win on Capitol Hill, like protecting immigrant “Dreamers” or reducing student loans. The best protection for women is to elect more pro-choice lawmakers.

Oops. The brief flurry of missiles and airstrikes between Iran and Israel seemed like it was going to be a big deal 10 days ago, but the mostly non-deadly military back-and-forth has proved to be performance art, not the start of World War III — which explains why nobody had a strong opinion on it. I’ll try going forward to focus on the topics that I’ve learned get bigger responses. Such as ...

📮This week’s question: In the most tumultuous spring for campus protest since 1970 (when six students were killed at Kent State and Jackson State), college administrators called in the cops on pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia, Yale, and NYU ... so far. Are university presidents doing the right thing in shutting down these protests, typically in the name of safety for Jewish students claiming harassment, or is this a dangerous assault on free speech? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Campus arrests” in the subject line.

When President Joe Biden came to Philadelphia last week, he made the centerpiece an endorsement from 15 — count ‘em, 15! — members of America’s version of a royal family, the Kennedys. Philly seemed like a fitting locale — John F. Kennedy’s popularity in the city, especially with Catholics, was a key part of his narrow 1960 victory — but that’s not why the move turned some heads. The Kennedy choir was sending a message to its wayward son, independent president candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that his own siblings and cousins reject his conspiracy-minded campaign. The endorsement also reflected a broader sense in the Biden campaign that third-party rivals, but especially RFK Jr., threaten to take votes from some of the people who picked Biden in 2020 when he and then-President Donald Trump were the only major candidates.

I wonder, though, if times have changed and Team Biden should be reconsidering its strategy. A couple of new polls released over the weekend suggest the Kennedy’s presence in the race is now hurting the GOP’s Trump more than the incumbent president. For example, an NBC News survey found Trump up by two points over Biden in a head-to-head matchup, but when RFK Jr. is thrown into the mix along with two left-wing candidates, Cornel West and Jill Stein, the results are reversed and now Biden leads by two points. Wasn’t it Trump’s people — including his behind-the-scenes guru Steve Bannon, as well as a major donor or two — encouraging the son of slain 1968 candidate Robert F. Kennedy to run, as some sort of chaos agent? What if the chaos is blowing back on Trump?

When RFK Jr. entered the race last year, running for a time as a Democrat, it was reasonable to think that so-called low-information voters with fond memories of the candidate’s father, and looking for an alternative, would gravitate away from Biden, whose approval ratings were at rock bottom. But the strange campaign of the anti-vaccine and sometimes anti-science Kennedy has now gotten enough attention that liberal-minded voters have figured out this is not your father’s RFK, while some conspiracy-minded, Trump-y voters are now intrigued. Third-party candidates get votes from people looking for excuses not to vote for a major-party candidate. With Trump starting to look weaker and ineffectual as he sits in his Manhattan hush-money trial, Bannon’s chaos agent is now giving voters an alternative to a shrinking Republican. The GOP should be pressing the panic button.

The debate over the usefulness of so-called “balanced,” on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand journalism didn’t start with the “both sides” coverage of Donald Trump’s threat to American democracy. On this date 15 years ago, the dirty tricks pulled by the fossil-fuel industry to bamboozle the public around climate change was the canary in the coal mine for the rise of disinformation. I wrote about a New York Times investigation into the Global Climate Coalition, which, despite its nice name, was a front group for Big Oil and its bought-off scientists. I wrote: “Journalists have to weigh many things in striving for the truth — but the ultimate mile marker must always be objective facts where they exist, and not a juggling act of talking heads, especially when one of the heads doesn’t even believe its own baloney it’s putting out there.” Read the rest: “How ‘balanced journalism’ helped the climate change deniers.”

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