Inside the Issue. There’s a story inside about the controversy at the Royal Purple over whether the football coach should have used ‘inappropriate language,’ in response to a Royal Purple story on allegedly special treatment for football players.
I’ve not commented on the story before, but a few points are worth mentioning.
First, this might have been a front page story in the Register, not something inside, on page 2.
Second, virtually all the coverage of this incident has focused on the language the football coach used, and whether it was appropriate. All this fussy , neo-Victorianism about what was ‘appropriate.’ Language is not the problem here, the prissy and squeamish worries over the football coach’s words notwithstanding. (The university can respond to the coach, its employee, as it wants.)
Reporters – and even bloggers — are going to go out into the world, and get cursed at. Most of the time, they won’t be part of the same organization as the person who curses at them, so they’ll have no easy — too easy — recourse to an administrative remedy. More to the point, no reporter should care if the coach cursed, and the administration teaches a weakling’s lesson when it focuses on whether speech — even cursing — is the problem.
These graduates will go out into the world, and may — sadly — face far worse than profanity. In that time, there’ll be no higher-level administrator who might intervene.
Access — and its denial — is the issue here. Government and organizations often threaten to deny access to reporters if they don’t get favorable coverage. It’s the curse of small towns, especially. Young reporters starting out here become too close to officials, and part of the story, rather than independent chroniclers, because they’re not strong enough to resists threats implicit or explicit.
They write what they think politicians and bureaucrats want to hear — it’s a Faustian bargain, selling too much, for too little. As with cursing, there was an administrative remedy here — the university administration could compel the football program to permit access.
That’s a rarity — usually, one has to report even when access is denied. The real test is when government, bureaucrats, and organization men curse, or deny access, and the reporter has no administrative remedy. What then?
A weak and impressionable reporter will give up his or her independence, and become what a politician wants.
The only thing that one needs to do is stick to one’s principles, holding tight to constitutional guarantees that define America.
I don’t fault the Royal Purple in any of this.
It says something about how fussy and servile Whitewater’s town culture is, though, that the town story has been about language, instead of robust defense of independent reporting in the face of bureaucratic intimidation about access.
One might have hoped, however faintly, that the Register might have understood this story.
Forge on — regardless of words, undaunted even over threats to access, and other intimidation. Integrity is tested most when there is no administrative remedy, and still one writes confidently and independently.