Posted on 05/07/2005 8:22:50 AM PDT by bgsugar
As I thought.
I resent the implication. This is a Saturday, and I'm not spending the whole day staring at a screen... the outside world does exist.
First of all this POS didn't ask a question. He threw out an incendiary characterization for effect.
Second, there is nothing about the concept of free speech that allows profanity vulgarity and plain grossness under any circumstances. There is a clear and distinct difference between having a so called comedian use all the potty words he knows if you have voluntarily paid to hear them. Quite clearly, using the same words as a verbal assault on someone not inviting it enters the realm of
"... following the state's disorderly conduct statute, a Class C misdemeanor that prohibits abusive, profane and vulgar language and obscene gestures in public areas.
But some question if Raj's behavior really violated the law.
There no shortage of idiots, specially on college campuses. There, there are "some" who would not question the wrongness of murder/cannibalism on stage.
What does that prove?
You'll notice the the Houston "Comical" reporters structured the article with many references from radicals and liberals who want to portray Raj as an innocent young student trying to use his Constitutional rights rather than a radical, profane, intolerant POS that he is.
Keep digging...
LOL!
He didn't get the chance too throw anything. Of course he may have ended up with a broken nose if he did.
This wasn't the pie guy, who was beaten down btw.
This idiot in question, made a rude comment during a Q&A.
He didn't rush the stage, he didn't resist when he was asked to leave.
Shouldn't have been arrested.
From Jim Oberg (yes, that Jim Oberg):
To: Outlook (for publication -- edited as needed)
The May 7th page 1 article by Jeffrey Gilbert and Terri Langford about the ‘heckling’ arrest at Ann Coulter’s speech at the University of Texas exhibited a poor level of basic journalism and editing. As a practicing journalist myself for 35 years (occasionally on the pages of the Houston Chronicle) I found the article as published to be superficial, biased, and misleading.
Even the headline-writing was misleading, in that it described how the arrest itself ‘raises hackles’, rather than the disruptive student’s behavior raising similar hackles. And the ‘heckling’ is described as a single event occurring after the program, rather than (as it actually did) occurring throughout the program and culminating in the question and answer period.
My son is a sophomore at UT and attended the event, and as it turned out, sat next to the young man in question, Ajai Raj (a writer for the student newspaper there). He emailed me: "That was the guy I asked to be quiet and he told me to fuck off! HA! Pretty funny stuff.” Throughout the speech, my son reports, “he was yelling the stupidest most ignorant comments I have ever heard ("Coulter is a Nazi," "Do you have something against brown people!?") and he was interrupting her every two minutes.” This is the character who is portrayed in your article as some sort of champion of free speech – his, but clearly not anyone else’s.
In an essay attributed to Raj on the DailyKOS blogsite, he does not dispute this description: ! “From the beginning I was yelling obscenities along with my friends, roaring at Ms. Coulter's right-wing bullshit festival the way no one else had the balls to.”
And your article went through extreme euphemistic convolutions to avoid an accurate portrayal of the true language used in the final confrontation. “When Raj took to the microphone, he confronted her about that view [of marriage], lacing his question with profanity,” the reporters wrote.
There is little dispute over his actual words: "You say that you believe in the sanctity of marriage. How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?" You may have to interpose enough asterisks to mask the raw language to the level required for a newspaper to publish, but at least let the adult readers fully understand the nature of the comment without verbal pussy-footing.
Yet somehow, the Chronicle’s reporters could not seem to find anyone at the speech itself to describe what these other witnesses may have seen as a pattern of deliberatively disruptive behavior. The newspaper quotes nobody at the speech who was offended. Instead, the reporters practice mind-reading when they write that Raj “thought he was exercising his right to free speech when he quizzed conservative pundit Ann Coulter on her definition of marriage”.
Their article continues: “But some question if Raj's behavior really violated the law. . . . Robert Jensen, a UT journalism professor, said he wasn't at the speech, but he said nothing he has heard or read constitutes disorderly conduct.” They added that “Jensen said it sounds like it may have been a pre-emptive arrest to get Raj out of the room,” when elsewhere in the article they make it clear the arrest didn’t occur until he was taken outside.
So after admitting that Jensen’s views are at best second or third hand and his speculations based on a misinterpretation of the sequence of events (why, then, was he even quoted?), the writers then simply identify him as an ordinary “journalism professor” who might, by that credential, be expected by a naïve reader to offer a balanced perspective.
What the article leaves out, however, is the information that Dr. Jensen is a far-left activist who has endorsed and supported Ward Churchill's analysis of 9/11 (“Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens”) on CommonDreams.org, Z-Net, and Counterpunch. He has urged that "God condemn America, so the world might live," and written that “Scratch the surface of U.S. rhetoric about its quest to bring freedom and democracy to the world, and one finds the suffering of the people who must live with the reality of U.S. foreign policy."
Such views are, of course, his perfect right to hold, but readers of the Houston Chronicle have the right to know, when a person’s evaluations of a news event are presented, what pre-existing biases he may bring to the issues discussed. This article failed to meet this standard, arguably with deliberate intent to deceive.
The reporters did find one person at the speech whose opinions they thought worthy of quoting, Emily Cadik, spokeswoman for ‘University Democrats’, who told them she didn’t think Raj should have been arrested because "using expletives on campus is not a crime and he wasn't posing a threat." In her view, as reported in your article, Coulter’s speech was just as offensive as Raj’s: “But she got away with it, and he got arrested."
Raj and his supporters trumpet their outrage over censorship, and then at the close of his essay on DailyKOS, he shows his own commitment to free speech: “And hey, Ann, don't come back to UT. We're better than your bullshit here. And I can think of at least one jackass here who can dish it out better than you.” Too bad your article didn’t give a clearer (and more honest) picture of this self-style civil libertarian and his supporters.
The public would be better served if the Houston Chronicle exercised its own free speech to inform, rather than propagandize through misinformation, as the reporters and editors involved in this story did.
James Oberg
see www.jamesoberg.com for my professional journalistic credentials and record
link to Chronicle story
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3171354
link to Raj letter at Daily KOS
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/5/5/11120/19514
background information on Jensen
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1891
--------
Here is my response to, and the original answer from, the Chronicle reporter who did the piece on the Coulter speech protest, that I protested. Note ALSO way way at the bottom, a second response I got from the paper's ombudsman who seems to agree with me. I'm still awaiting any sign of REAL response, such as publishing my version in 'viewpoints', before going to a wwider audience on this issue.
To: Jeffrey Gilbert
Thanks for the reply, which is very encouraging -- I hope that I made it clear that I appreciate the environment we wordsmiths work under, in terms of both resources (like time), access, page space constraints, editorial direction, and our own culture of colleagues, perspectives, and experience. I've been taken to task myself, sometimes vigorously, and occasionally justifiably, and I always was grateful for the candid critiques (sometimes, not immediately, I must admit).
The central issue always has to be, not who was right or wrong yesterday, but what we're going to do tomorrow (which might involve correcting the record set down yesterday, but mainly deals with future treatment of similar stories).
** As a journalist, you know that I do not write the headlines. That job belongs to the copy desk, and I don’t know what it is going to say until it shows up in the paper the next day. **
Boy can we swap stories about THAT! However, in this case, we have to agree that the tone of the headline was set by the tone of the text, and aside from the editorial staff passion for puns and alliteration, I don't think this headline strayed far from the way you wrote the story. If so, let's BOTH go and beat up on somebody (verbally, of course)... Who and where?
** And we debated printing his exact quote, but opted against it. Again, that was not my call. But we did put a link to it on our website. We do try to appeal to a broad audience, and for as many people, like you, who wouldn’t have been offended, you and I both know that there would have been just as many people who would have been offended, even if we used asterisks. **
This is the core of the issue, it seems -- and by ducking the truly vile nature of the words used by Raj, you easily left many readers with a sense of disproportion between what you allowed them to naively imagine what he might have said, and the police response. You could have expected them to emotionally react that the police were excessive, but those who did were arguably duped by the circumlocutions used.
Further, to even suggest -- as you stated as fact -- that he was actually asking a question in order to learn something about Coulter's beliefs is to deliberately camouflage his overt intentions, expressed elsewhere during and after the incident. For you to allow his social sabotage to masquerade as dialog, even raucous, gutter-talk give-and-take, was to mischaracterize (even fictionalize) the entire event. Here is where I think the journalism craft was betrayed.
** I’m sorry you feel the reporting in this story was not objective. I think if you were to take a look at a larger sample of my stories, you would see I am fair and objective. And if you knew me, I think you would be surprised to hear my political beliefs. **
I appreciate the verbal gesture but I don't need or want an apology from you. I want better reporting for the public. How do I go about encouraging this? This story is hardly unique, or even egregious, on the pages of the Chronicle in the last year or two -- semantic loading, selective interviewing, clear slants in omissions of explanatory or exculpatory information, patterns in selections and placement of items deemed newsworthy at all -- this is an issue that has raised concerns from many intelligent, fair-minded readers, and increasingly their response is to give up and just find their news from other sources. I'm seriously in doubt about whether I want to continue my own subscription.
** We used Jensen because he is known for his protesting. What he said has nothing to do with who was giving the speech. In fact, when I talked to him, we didn’t talk about Coulter at all. We were simply talking about the law. **
Known to you, perhaps, but how about your readers who would be left with an inaccurate assessment of his balanced expertise? And by the way, he's hardly known for "protesting", but rather for serious far-left activism and opinionating -- unless you'd seen him at some recent anti-abortion rally ? You also confirm here and broaden the issue that you went to him to get him to talk about and speculate about an event he didn't know anything about -- hardly the kind of 'expert testimony' that enhances a reader's understanding of an issue.
Further, although I note you went far afield to find Jensen, I repeat my concern that you didn't seem to be able to find anybody at the meeting who felt offended by the deliberately-disruptive words, gestures, and actions of Raj. You might talk with my son, for example, who recalled that early in the presentation, as Raj had already begun screaming obscenities from his seat, my son turned to him and said, 'Hey, shut up, I can't hear the speaker." To which the non-plussed Raj blurted out, and my son remembers the words exactly,"Oh, sorry...(pause). No, i'm not sorry. Fuck YOU!", and continued with his 'heckling'.
** Thanks for your comments, **
What I would be grateful for is any indication that they were of use to you in the continuous perfection of our common craft. I do appreciate your civility and candor, and that is a good step. What do we do differently, if anything, in the future?
By the way, as we are discussing a public-interest topic which we are both in-the-public-eye participants in, I'm assuming you know that any of my comments can be distributed and posted anywhere, and i'm assuming the same with regard to yours to me. Thanks, and I'll be watching!
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