August 21, 2009 08:35 PM UTC

Journalism Professor Urges Media to "Report the Hate"

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

Charles Davis, a journalism professor and Executive Director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, wrote an interesting column urging the media to report on what’s really happening at many congressional town halls around the country:

Hate, shuffled off stage in the post-racial haze of the election of the nation’s first black president, is back with a vengeance. Hate, if it ever truly threatened to leave the political stage, is most definitely back, larger and nastier than ever.

As a near-absolutist First Amendment advocate, my prescription for hate speech is always more speech: Give the bigot a microphone as big as the hatred, I say, and watch as the marketplace of ideas works its magic.

Perhaps that’s why I worry, as I watch an emboldened mob grow more irresponsible with each passing day, that the mainstream media fails to give hate the coverage it deserves today.

My proposition is simple: Major news organizations need to cover hate the way they once did – as a standalone beat.

I was reminded of the way the news media once treated old-fashioned hate the other day while reading a PBS discussion of a fabulous book, “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.” The Race Beat, co-authored by Hank Klibanoff and Gene Roberts, documents the coverage of the civil rights movement in the South and chronicles in chilling detail what we now recall was a watershed in the treatment of hate as, well, morally repugnant behavior that we as a nation just weren’t going to stand for.

Such a stance required a moral determination on the part of the press – that overt racism institutionalized by Southern governments was wrong – and coverage of the goon sheriffs, their German Shepherds and their water hoses and their physical thuggery offered the nation a picture of hate in all its awful fury…

…Fox News’ Trace Gallagher said the other day that Fox would return to live coverage of the president’s health care town hall provided there is “any contentious questions, anybody yelling.”

Somewhere, somehow, the news media have to make the same determination those brave civil rights-era reporters and editors made: This is wrong, deeply wrong, and we must cover it, day in, day out, like any other beat, albeit a more distasteful beat than most.