While waiting for Donald Trump to take office, careful news consumers have their eyes on the alert for assertions of false equivalency in the mainstream media. One such instance took place in a Thursday New York Times story headlined, “On Campus, Trump Fans Say They Need ‘Safe Spaces’.” Good topic and pretty solid execution.
Except for the passage highlighted in this tweet:
No, @nytimes, one is a crime, the other is criticism. Stop doing this. https://t.co/7C6vUk2ZT0 pic.twitter.com/lt8NaasmXg
— Andre Segura (@andresegura) December 8, 2016
The story examines how Trump supporters at the University of Michigan — and other schools — feel that their “views are not respected. Some are adopting the language of the left, saying they need a ‘safe space’ to express their opinions — a twist resented by left-leaning protesters,” writes Anemona Hartocollis.
There are on-campus “tensions,” too, and it’s here that the story runs into some difficulty. According to NewsDiffs.org, a site that monitors changes to articles in the New York Times and other sites, the story originally made this assertion: “Bias incidents on both sides have been reported. A student walking near campus was threatened with being lit on fire because she wore a hijab. Other students were accused of being racist for supporting Mr. Trump, according to a campuswide message from Mark Schlissel, the university’s president.”
That formulation didn’t last. In its place, the New York Times opted for an approach that attributed the equivalency here to the campus president: “According to a campuswide message from Mark Schlissel, the university’s president, bias incidents on both sides have been reported. A student walking near campus was threatened with being lit on fire because she wore a hijab. Other students were accused of being racist for supporting Mr. Trump.”
Nor did that formulation last. The next generation sounds a bit stilted: “According to a campuswide message from Mark Schlissel, the university’s president, bias incidents have been reported. A student walking near campus was threatened with being lit on fire because she wore a hijab. Other students were accused of being racist for supporting Mr. Trump.”
In a statement, the New York Times tells this blog, “The paragraph in question reported the sentiment of the University’s President in a letter to the university community. To make that clear, editors added a link to that letter and moved the attribution up.”
That’s an accurate description of the changes. The problem with the initial version, however, is the “both sides” language, which disappeared with the revisions. These words, though the powerful work of cliche, have become code for equivalency. Ah, both sides do it, is the well-worn lament of the grizzled, alienated U.S. voter. Applied to the events in the New York Times story, it sets the reader up for a comparable level of severity. And as the Twitter user at the top of this post pointed out, comparability is scarce.
Rick Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the University of Michigan, tells the Erik Wemple Blog that the original letter from Schlissel also received criticism. “We did get some feedback,” he says. That letter features this paragraph:
We saw a threatening message painted on the rock near our campus; a student walking near campus was threatened with being lighted on fire because she wore a hijab; another student left his apartment to go to class and found a swastika with a message telling him to go home. Some students have also been shouted at and accused of being racist because of their political views.
Presenting information of this sort involves important judgments, not cop-outs that align with mainstream media traditions. When “both sides” are propagating the same level of mischief, say it; when they’re not, say that.