To Print Or Not To Print: Ad Kindles Outrage

Last Wednesday, on the last day of Black History Month, the UC-Berkeley Daily Californian published an advertisement titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea--and Racist Too."

The next day, editor-in-chief Daniel Hernandez entered his newsroom only to face a group of staffers furious about the ad. They were shortly joined by 40 protestors--led by one of the newspaper's own columnists.

Hernandez said the protestors began yelling at him, calling the advertisement a "travesty," tearing up copies of the newspaper and demanding an apology right then and there.

Hernandez and other top editors immediately convened a meeting at which a decisive majority voted to run a front-page apology, with a longer explanation inside the paper.

"We realize that the ad allowed the Daily Cal to become an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry," the apology reads.

The same ad was sent to about 30 other college newspapers. At UC-Davis, another school that ran the advertisement last Wednesday, about 75 people protested in front of the school's student union. By the next morning, their newspaper, too, had published an apology.

The ad--and the apologies--drew national media attention and sparked intense controversy, inspiring scores of letters to the editor--400 e-mails at the Daily Californian alone.

The ad that inspired the protests was written by David Horowitz, a left-wing 1960s activist who once worked with the Black Panthers and who now considers himself conservative. His Center for the Study of Popular Culture, bankrolled by thousands of individual contributors, as well as the Bradley Foundation and other conservative groups, paid for the ads.

The ad says "there is no single group responsible for the crime of slavery" and claims "reparations to African Americans have already been paid...in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences."

It dismisses parallels to Holocaust reparations and payments to black participants in the Tuskegee syphilis study and disputes claims that African Americans today suffer economic hardship because of slavery.

The Crimson received the same advertisement that the California papers did but decided not to print it.

"The ad was written in a style that seemed as though it sought solely to aggravate our readers, and we didn't feel comfortable running it unedited," said Crimson President C. Matthew MacInnis '02. "Horowitz' advertisement was largely editorial in content and as such he is welcome to submit his piece as an editorial submission where it would be subject to the same standards of editing and fact-checking as our other editorial pieces. We don't believe it is ethical to allow individuals to purchase advertisements as a means by which to circumvent the editorial process."

The Crimson wrote Horowitz last night, offering to consider an opinion piece on slavery reparations.

But he replied: "Since your editors have censored my ad, why would I have any reason to believe that they would accept anything I wrote on this subject for publication?"

Horowitz's views are not new: he wrote the "ten reasons" in a slightly different form in a Salon.com article published May 30, 2000.

But now that nearly 30 college papers have received copies of Horowitz's ad, it has created dilemmas for newsrooms in campuses across the country--about whether student newspapers should publish controversial advertisements and about how tightly student newspapers monitor the ads they run.

"A newspaper has a responsibility to use the First Amendment responsibly," said Eleeza V. Agopian, editor-in-chief of the California Aggie at UC-Davis. "We don't run everything that comes across our desk. We have to be mindful of the community we live in."

Aggie policy calls for the editor-in-chief to approve any political or potentially controversial ads, Agopian said. In this case, she said, protocol broke down.

Calling the publication of Horowitz's ad a "mistake," Agopian said she had decided to run an apology in the next day's paper even before receiving angry letters and meeting with other editors at the paper.

Hernandez's apology in the Daily Californian was itself criticized by people who felt the papers had thrown their lot with censorship. Washington Post columnist Jonathan Yardley wrote on Monday that "what those editors did in California last week deserves no sympathy at all."

Hernandez said he stands by the apology but has second thoughts about its page-one status.

"In retrospect, we would have apologized, but less overtly," he said. "It had to do with the pressure of the immediate emotional situation."

Top editors at Columbia, where Horowitz spent his undergraduate years, decided not to run the ad in the first place and avoided the fierce controversy that the California papers faced.

According to Michael L. Mirer, the Columbia Daily Spectator's editor-in-chief, newspaper policy does not permit political advertising of any kind.

Though Horowitz's ad included a small promotion for his pamphlet, called "The Death of the Civil Rights Movement," Mirer said the ad was basically political.

"The content, no matter what we thought of it, wasn't the problem so much as the form of the original ad," Mirer said.

The Spectator received a second advertisement from Horowitz yesterday, titled "What Columbia Can't Read." The ad said, "only one side of this issue is now permissible at Columbia." Mirer said editors have rejected that ad, too, because it is "out-and-out inaccurate about what happened between us and them."

In an interview yesterday, Horowitz criticized the California papers for apologizing and said other papers' decisions not to run his ad amounted to "censorship."

"What it reflects is a situation on American campuses that's more repressive than the McCarthy era," said Horowitz, who said his parents were card-carrying Communists.

Horowitz said his organization had budgeted about $12,000 for the ad campaign, an amount that put advertisements in national-circulation newspapers out of his reach. Instead, he decided to send the ad to college newspapers around the country as a less expensive alternative.

After editing the liberal magazine Rampart in the late 1960s and 1970s, Horowitz became estranged from the civil rights movement, which he said focused more on portraying blacks as victims of past oppression than on pushing for equality.

In the early 1980s, he held what he called a "second thoughts" convention, inviting activist friends from the 1960s who shared his disillusionment. In the 1980s, he wrote a series of stinging biographies of the Kennedys, Fords and Rockefellers.

Once a left-winger, Horowitz is now the house conservative at Salon.com, where he writes a bi-weekly column.