Student organizations like the College Democrats and evangelical bible study groups can’t exist without the right to exclude dissenters, says Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). This amounts to a necessary form of discrimination against students who disagree with a group’s mission.

If a university required its progressive magazine to accept columns from every conservative student, “how would you prevent the magazine from being watered down or taken over, or from losing its integrity?” Lukianoff says. “Discriminating on the basis of viewpoint is part and parcel of having a viewpoint-based group.”

Without that ability to discriminate, he says, student groups are denied their First Amendment right to freedom of association.

He made the comments in a Monday speech before the National Association of Scholars, a conservative nonprofit working to counter an alleged “liberal bias” in academia. Yet FIRE is a nonpartisan organization, and Lukianoff says he accepts speaking invitations from groups representing all viewpoints.

He focused his speech on a June 28 Supreme Court decision in CLS v. Martinez. The 5-4 ruling, with the court’s four liberals plus Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority, went against an evangelical Christian group at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law that required its members to sign a “statement of faith” proclaiming, among other things, their opposition to premarital and gay sex.

Hastings stripped the evangelical Christian group, known as the Christian Legal Society, of its official recognition, preventing it from obtaining college funding and limiting its ability to reserve rooms and advertise meetings.

In his speech, Lukianoff assailed the court’s decision, calling it “fraught with willful blindness.” He says it directly contradicted previous rulings and has “panic-worthy” implications for students at public colleges and universities with similar policies.

He cites Central Michigan University, one such institution, as an example. There, progressive students published on Facebook their intention to band together, join the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative group on campus, and run for elected office.

The way Lukianoff describes it, you wouldn’t think anyone sane would agree with the court’s ruling. Enter Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA and author of the popular blog The Volokh Conspiracy, who says the court’s decision makes perfect sense.

The ruling didn’t abridge anyone’s First Amendment rights, Volokh maintains. Just as a university might require groups to limit membership only to students, or to be democratically run, it can also require groups not to discriminate in accepting members.

Such rules don’t abridge students’ right to free association or free speech, Volokh says, since those groups can easily move off campus and operate without formal school recognition:

Just as the right to abortion, speech, or private education doesn’t yield a right to government funding of abortion, speech, or private education—and isn’t even violated by rules that expressly exclude abortion, certain subject matters of speech, or private education from generally available benefit programs—so the right to expressive association isn’t violated by rules that give benefits only to groups that organize themselves in a certain way.

Lukianoff says that’s bollocks. “Official recognition is actually what it means to be a student group,” he says, and it’s nearly impossible for groups to operate without the benefits recognition affords.

“A lot of the time, it means you can’t meet on campuses, can’t apply for student funding, can’t be listed in the student handbook, can’t actually email students,” he says. “It means essentially that you are a nonentity on that campus.”

I’m inclined to agree with Lukianoff and chalk Volokh’s position up to unfamiliarity with student life and campus regulations. While I’ve found policies surrounding student groups to vary widely by campus, it’s usually challenging to operate without formal recognition, particularly at the undergraduate level.

How about on your campus? How easy would it be to operate a viewpoint-based student group without formal recognition? Sound off in the comments.

For more: Check out SCOTUSblog’s analysis of the decision, which adds a few interesting twists.

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

Bob Steele

The crux of Steele’s argument is that advocacy journalism is not journalism at all. Reporters must not be liberal or conservative, he writes, but it’s OK to have opinions that fall at different points along the typical liberal-conservative spectrum. This is a dreadfully wrongheaded argument that collapses when subjected to even the weakest scrutiny.

Since the obsession with objectivity is a pet issue of mine, I submitted the following comment underneath Steele’s piece:

So, if I’ve got this right, “activist-driven” journalism is always bad. Ideological bias is always bad, at least if it’s from the left or right. (How about the middle?) But it’s fine to have “a range of views on issues that move along a spectrum,” whatever that means.

Your analysis fails to acknowledge that much of the best, most impactful and historic journalism is steeped in activism. Would you not consider the following works to be “driven by ideological bias or activist intentions”?
- “Hiroshima” by John Hersey
- “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson
- “Unsafe at any Speed” by Ralph Nader
- Seymour Hersh’s coverage of the My Lai Massacre and torture at Abu Ghraib
- Edward R. Murrow’s takedown of Joe McCarthy

The list goes on.

Your column is wrong because facts are facts; activist intentions can drive journalists to doggedly pursue the truth, or to raise public awareness of an important issue, in a way that they cannot if they are bending over backwards to appear unbiased.

In other words, activist intentions are not inherently problematic or unethical. They just become so when they lead to journalism that shuns fairness and accuracy.

A Pew report released last month — just noticed yesterday by the indispensable @NiemanLab — found the median age of a Twitter user to be 31, while the median age of a Facebook user is now 33. Back in May 2008, Facebook’s median age was 26.

Credit: Pew Research Center Publications

Since we are a youth organization that’s always thinking about the best ways to reach our demographic, this shift has big implications for Campus Progress. We use pages and, occasionally, ads to reach young people on Facebook. On Twitter, we’ve got an account as well as lists that categorize our members by the program and department they’re involved in.

Of course, we’ve all seen Twitter accounts belonging to users who signed up only to use the service infrequently or abandon it altogether. (Research indicates that a huge proportion of Twitter users are barely active.) When conducting its survey, Pew asked subjects if they ever use Twitter, but not how often they use it. The real question needs to be: What’s the median age of active Twitter users compared to to active Facebook users.

I haven’t seen anyone try to quantify Facebook users’ level of activity — leave a comment if you know of such a study — but my totally un-scientific sense is that there tends to be less deviation among Facebook users: Almost everyone I know checks it at least once a day.

So maybe we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions just yet about which service is “better” for reaching young people. If age were all that mattered, MySpace, with a median user age of 26, would be the unquestionable choice for reaching our audience.

As my friend and former professor Eszter Hargittai has written, there are substantial differences in the way people use social networking not just based on their age, but also based on their socioeconomic status, ethnicity and religion. Campaigns and organizations like ours that want to attract a broad audience need to utilize a variety of outreach tactics and social media tools, not just one or two.

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)

A column by NPR’s ombudsman defending the network’s refusal to use the word “torture” to describe U.S. interrogation techniques sparked an uproar that shows no sign of ending soon.

NPR currently uses phrases like “enhanced interrogation,” “harsh interrogation” and “techniques that some critics call torture.”

The ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, presents this as a debate between some who want journalists to “take sides” and other, more rational people who believe journalists must be neutral and objective, noting differences and presenting them to the public so that people can make decisions for themselves. Shepard writes:

[T]he role of a news organization is not to choose sides in this or any debate. People have different definitions of torture and different feelings about what constitutes torture. NPR’s job is to give listeners all perspectives, and present the news as detailed as possible and put it in context.

So, to take sides or not to take sides? The problem is that this is a false choice. No journalist behaves as a neutral observer, though a tremendous number see themselves that way. Journalists constantly make subjective decisions — when they decide what to cover, how to cover it, which sources to contact and how much weight to give them in a story, and so much more.

If an NPR reporter were covering the health effects of cigarette smoking, for instance, I doubt he or she would present a story that gave equal time to contradictory arguments from the FDA and from a cigarette manufacturer, then end the story. The same could be said about climate change coverage.

Shepard’s argument is hypocritical in other ways. Glenn Greenwald has noted that mainstream media outlets refusing to call U.S. tactics torture have no compunctions about labeling other governments’ actions as such (or of describing foreigners as “terrorists” or “militants” based on our government’s word alone). Yet these journalists never bother to present the opposing point of view — and in most cases, the torture techniques strikingly resemble ones the United States employs.

In attempting to defend the mainstream media/journalism school conception of the objective reporter, Shepard ties herself in a Guordian knot and presents an argument through which a middle schooler could poke holes. In an interview on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” she essentially argues that there is no such thing as objective truth — or if there is, it isn’t her responsibility to do anything about it. By her standard, if a politician says the sky is green, she would no longer be able to report that the sky is blue without presenting it as a debate between two sides, even if one side might be lying:

I think that as a journalist at a reputable, credible news organization, you have to include all sides in the debate. … When there are two sides, or three sides, it becomes a debate. … Whether [a point of view] is intended to dupe people or not, the role of the journalist is to put that information out there.

Later in the show, a caller notes that there’s no nuance as to whether certain acts constitute child abuse or domestic violence, so why is there nuance when describing torture? Here, Shepard is assisted by host Neal Conan, a fellow believer in objective journalism, who says, “There’s no really [sic] other side for child abuse or domestic violence.” So it sounds like child abusers just have to manufacture an “other side” and journalists will cut them some slack and portray it as a debate.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Depending on the type of child abuse, for instance, there often is another side – NAMBLA comes to mind – but something tells me NPR isn’t going to call them for a quote. NPR reporters, like most other journalists, make a reasonable but subjective decision that it would be unnecessary, offensive, ridiculous, etc. to portray this as a debate between two sides.

Still, the institution of mainstream media is insular and irrational enough that a significant portion of its members somehow think they must — and can — check every preconception and opinion at the door when they report a story.

What’s really going on here is a combination of two factors: (1) strong support among much of mainstream journalism for the false tenet of “objectivity,” and (2) an extremely effective campaign by the right against the “liberal media” that has made journalists, who overwhelmingly are personally liberal, feel a deep sense of guilt about their ideology, in turn making them hesitant and terrified to offend conservatives.

As we’re seeing from the despair, regressive thinking and heel-clicking that’s come along with the collapse of newspapers, significant portions of the journalism industry aren’t particularly big on thinking outside the box. The notion of journalistic objectivity set in decades ago and, without much critical thinking about its sensibility, it hasn’t received a strong enough challenge. Nor has the myth that mainstream media is a liberal institution.

The best way to return journalism to reality is to support forward-thinking, innovative journalists and organizations that believe in fairness, not neutrality, and to avoid supporting regressive institutions and organizations that legitimize behavior like torture by using Orwellian phrases like “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Here’s how I intend to begin: The next time NPR hosts a pledge drive, I’m calling in to make my views known about their refusal to call torture what it is. I hope you’ll consider joining me.

Recommended reading: In April, Jay Rosen convincingly argued that there isn’t much of a place for he said/she said reporting in an era of new media.

Earlier: Is this English?, Curious ad

I’ve come to care less and less about Obama’s speeches because of the huge disconnect between his words and actions. Our president talks of turning the page on George W. Bush’s illegal imprisonment programs, all the while authorizing their continuation in Bagram, Afghanistan. He talks of his faith in the American court system, all the while advocating that Congress permit him to indefinitely detain anyone he wants. He talks of leading the most open government in our history, all the while refusing to release photos showing how we treat our prisoners — and even supporting legislation to change the law because it doesn’t permit the secrecy he desires.

The campaign for the White House is over, so it’s time to stop getting excited about rhetoric while ignoring the president’s actions. I’ll celebrate when Israel and the Palestinians make real steps toward peace, when a reformist candidate defeats Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, and when Afghanistan and Pakistan show at least some signs of stabilizing.

Until then, let’s talk about policy and actions to achieve those goals, not words and promises that make us feel good but actually accomplish little.

(Cross-posted at CampusProgress.org)