Doing our part to shut down the ultra right

 

November 21, 2017

BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS

 

As journalists, my DigBoston colleagues and I have a responsibility to do our best to cover news of the day fairly and accurately. And that’s based on our abiding belief in practising ethical journalism. Even though we’re street reporters for an alternative urban news weekly—a bit rough around the edges…  and known for wearing our emotions on our collective sleeve from time to time in our pursuit of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.

 

In 2002, Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute—an influential Florida journalism school—condensed journalistic ethics down to three principles that we strongly agree with:

 

1. Seek truth and report it as fully as possible.
2. Act independently.
3. Minimize harm.

 

It’s that third admonition that comes into play when we consider how to approach covering events run by ultra-right wingers. Like last weekend’s rally at Parkman Bandstand on the Boston Common. Which is why this publication has decided to “unname” ultra right-wing individuals and organizations in our pages going forward.

 

The rally itself and the couple of similar small Boston rallies that preceded it are almost comic in their insignificance, but the ideas they represent are not. When put into practice, they do a great deal of harm. By helping spread them, then, we would too—violating our ethical mandate to minimize harm in the process.

 

Those ideas are many, varied, and extremely confused as it turns out. The expressed beliefs of people organizing recent hard-right events have been an ill-conceived mishmash of right-wing libertarian, right-wing nationalist, right-wing populist, and right-wing Christian evangelical thinking plus an assortment of random conspiracy theories.

 

To our point, however, DigBoston cannot ignore the fact that these organizers work with latter-day nazis, fascists, and white supremacists. Neither can we turn a blind eye to the toxic thread of misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-immigrant views present in their circles.

 

Nor can we go along with many other media outlets in pretending that rally organizers aren’t simply giving one version of their politics in the light of day, and another version in the relative privacy of their normal online forums.

 

As Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Center said to the New Republic earlier this year, “The right says the left is violent and they need to be prepared for it, but when they turn their head they’re wishing for nothing but violence, death, and destruction, on anyone and anything that’s not white.”

 

It’s clear to us that the most reprehensible supporters of such rallies, from Boston to grim Charlottesville to San Francisco, do not believe in democracy and are interested in bathing the world in the blood of their perceived enemies. Who include all people of African descent, all Latinos, all Native Americans, all Asians, all Arabs, all Muslims, and all Jews.

 

Yes, we’re back to that insanity.

 

They also lump in all their political enemies for conversion or extirpation depending on their individual ethnic, religious, or racial backgrounds: Democrats (who they consider to be socialists, communists, or whatever), socialists, communists, anarchists, Greens, and other parties and ideologies to the left of President Donald Trump. They further have a deep and abiding hatred for women and LGBTQ folks, and expect the former to submit to male domination—and the latter to at best run and hide, and at worst to go to the death camps they like to “joke” about in dank corners of the Internet.

 

They assign these people subhuman status and deem them unworthy of participation—or indeed existence—in the hateful society they want to create. They also ascribe magic powers to some groups like Jews. They believe said groups control the world with those imagined powers and must be destroyed because of them.

 

In addition, they believe that people of northern European descent—a group in which many of them claim or feign membership—have their own magic powers. And that they have been chosen by History or God or Wotan or Fate to rule the world and have a right to eliminate all opposition to that rule—which will make the planet “pure.”

 

For a long time since World War II, it’s been easy to dismiss such reactionaries as lunatics because the original nazis and fascists were crushed by force of arms at the cost of tens of millions of lives. And driven from public life the world over. But now they have returned in many countries including the US, their ideas being spread over the web along with a lot of much nicer ideas.

 

In working with today’s nazis, fascists, and white supremacists, we believe that the organizers of the recent ultra-right rallies are effectively joining forces with them and are therefore helping build their movements. As such, while we agree that all parties concerned have the right to free speech, we do not think that extends to the right to free publicity for any of them in our pages. Given the clear and present danger that genocidal malcontents in their ranks present.

 

Stopping ultra-right forces from becoming a real threat to humanity requires not playing their game. As journalists, the way we play their game is by drawing attention to their spokespeople and organizations, and helping them spread their toxic ideas to even more of the kind of confused, bitter, angry people they’re already recruiting on social media.

 

So, we’ll report on ultra-right events when we decide they’re newsworthy, but we refuse to give ultra-right leaders and organizations the publicity and media platform that they want most of all. Because more attention gets them more followers and thus more political power. And we think that other news media—network TV first and foremost—are being extremely irresponsible and unethical by continuing to create a press feeding frenzy around every ultra-right action or pronouncement they hear about.

 

We’ll cover the activities of ultra-right individuals and organizations from time to time in carefully considered ways. We’ll even quote them—either anonymously or using pseudonyms we make up for each occasion. But we will not print their names in DigBoston, and we won’t link to their websites or social media presences either. Except when they commit crimes. Or in rare situations where we will do greater harm by not printing their names. That’s our unnaming policy. And we’re sticking to it. We will also apply it to other individuals and organizations that call for —or work with those who call for—crimes against humanity. In the interest of minimizing harm in our reporting. And in the defense of democracy, social justice, and human rights—which is our core mission as a publication of record.

 

We invite fellow journalists and news outlets the world over to join us in adopting this policy.

 

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The editors and staff of DigBoston encourage readers to share this editorial widely.

 

Jason Pramas is executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston.