By Scott Libin
Poynter Online Managing Editor
Where I work, the legendary status
of Eugene Patterson is perhaps second only to that of Nelson Poynter
himself. Patterson won a Pulitzer Prize
for his Atlanta Constitution columns
on civil rights during the 1960s. He
became editor of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times
in 1972 and, upon Poynter’s death in 1978, became chairman of the board of the
Modern Media Institute, now known as The Poynter Institute.
A more-revered figure around here
would be hard to name. So, when someone
said on this site last week that Patterson should have been shot for those
civil rights columns,
well, those would be fightin’ words — if we at the Institute weren’t such a
collegial group.
The comment came from Bill White,
commander of the American National Socialist Workers’ Party, whose magazine
cover for April features a swastika and the huge headline reading “Happy
Birthday Hitler.” White was responding
to a piece by Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark titled “They Shot His Dog: Historical
Lessons on Incivility,”
which drew a parallel between the racist hate letters that appeared on op-ed
pages in the South during the ’60s and some of the online user comments causing
concern among journalists across the country today.
Why would we allow on our site the
suggestion by a white supremacist that Gene Patterson deserved to die?
In one sense, it seems to violate
our own guidelines on user comments,
which say, “We will remove messages that contain … personal attacks, insults or
threats.”
On the other hand, in context, the
comment could constitute an attempt at humor: “Its [sic] a shame they shot his dog — they should have shot him
instead. I can’t see what the dog had to do with it,” White wrote.
He went on to offer his
perspective on the broader issue that was at the very heart of Clark’s
column and the coverage that accompanied it — the conflict between the values
of civil discourse and of freely expressed opinion on significant issues:
“You can censor anything you like
but you guys don’t own or control the media any more — and what you do or
don’t do in your increasingly irrelevant publications really just doesn’t
matter,” White wrote.
That sentiment is probably shared
by many people who would like to think they have nothing in common with the
politics of people like White. The same
could be said for his closing comment:
“So continue the self-absorbed
debate from the position of your own ‘importance’ while that very importance —
and you [sic] ability to act as gate keeper of public opinion — fades away.”
White’s comments also offer
insight into the tactics of the group he represents — insight that may be
troubling, but that has clear relevance to those who report on issues that are
important, emotional and divisive:
“Now, we don’t just protest at the
newspaper — we go to the writer’s homes and protest there,” White says.
It didn’t make my day to encounter
such a subtly menacing message aimed at journalists on our site. But the mission of Poynter Online is not to
protect journalists from unpleasant truths or unpopular political
positions. It is to inform and help
journalists do their jobs.
Sometimes that means encountering
comments that offend.
What do you think?
