Protect Free Press at Brown

The Brown campus is still reeling from last week's theft of 4,000 copies of the Brown Daily Herald by an assemblage of students named--strangely and somewhat offensively--the "Third World" coalition. The attack on the Herald followed the publication of an advertisement by David Horowitz opposing reparations for the descendants of slaves. The ad was inflammatory to say the least, asserting in part that African-Americans owed an equal debt to white Christians for the creation of an anti-slavery movement. But nothing in the ad would justify--indeed, no mere statement of opinion could justify--the removal of newspapers and ideas from the public square.

The Herald's decision to print the ad was based on a desire for open debate and discussion, valid reasons indeed for a newspaper dedicated to and protected by the freedom of the press. Unfortunately, Brown University seems as if it is unsure whether to support the freedom of its daily newspaper. The interim president has qualified her criticism of the theft, and the faculty panel discussion that was scheduled in place of a more open student gathering was remarkably uniform in its condemnation of the advertisement. We urge the university to change its course and draw a clear line between responsible criticism and unacceptable vandalism.

Though we recognize the Herald's reasoning, its decision was not the only one a responsible newspaper could have made. Advertising is a business decision, and newspapers are under no obligation whatsoever to print ads that they judge to be bad business. A newspaper has an equal right to decide whether it wishes to profit from the publication of a specific advertisement as to decide whether it will invest in tobacco stocks and profit from the sale of cigarettes.

In preparing editorial content, however, business considerations are ignored, and the need to inform readers is paramount. Indeed, after The Crimson chose not to accept the advertisement, its editorial department contacted Horowitz and offered to consider an opinion piece on the subject, an offer he refused. The Crimson's news department also included the full text of the ad as an illustration to its March 7 story, judging that readers would not be able to understand the issue in context without having access to Horowitz's statements. No uproar followed, proving that Harvard's student body is able to listen to contrary viewpoints--even controversial ones--and to recognize the value of the open exchange of opinion.

Whether or not to accept the advertisement is a valid decision for newspapers to make, and neither conclusion legitimates the response of stealing newspapers. Indeed, the copies of the Herald that were stolen did not even contain the offending ad, but only articles defending it. The theft was pure retribution, and the tenor of the "demands" levied by the protesters--free advertising space, the donation of the purchase price to campus minority organizations--seem to indicate a desire for payback rather than a concern for standards. The arguments to justify the theft--that it was not theft because the Herald was freely distributed or that it was a legitimate act of "civil disobedience"--are so poor that it is disturbing that so many members of Brown's faculty, tenured professors dedicated to reasoned study, would echo and support them.

But it would be pointless merely to add our voice to the growing pile of condemnations of the paper thieves. What is most concerning about the Brown debacle is not the theft or its intellectually dishonest defenders, but rather the assumption, equally shared by the Third World coalition and many of its detractors, that newspapers are ideological monoliths--that the decision to accept an ad or revise a story can be motivated only by political biases and not by honest deliberation on journalistic principles. After all, the Daily Herald printed the advertisement even though it has taken no position on reparations for slavery in the last two years, and The Crimson chose not to accept the advertisement even though it strongly opposed reparations in an editorial last March. But that did not stop the Herald from being lambasted as racist, nor did it stop The Crimson from being called an arch-liberal censor.

The media should always be viewed with some degree of healthy skepticism. But when every decision is reviewed for its political overtones, when every newspaper is supported as an ally or combated as an opponent, when all interest in independent and fair assessment is replaced by a thirst for patronage and payback, society--and university campuses--will have lost something very great indeed.