In our office at Broadway and 111th we talk about a Chinese wall between News and Opinion. To me it’s felt more like the line between enemy territories. Crossing the line is lethal, especially if you do it by accident. Defect and you can’t come back. Get entrenched and you’ll spend a lot of time firing missiles at the other side.
The point is that if you work for this paper, you’ve got to choose. Like other mainstream papers, we have a policy: you can write News or you can write Opinion. You can report the decision-makers’ decisions, or you can make judgments on the ethics of those decisions. You can’t do both.
I chose News.
From the News trench, the Opinion side sometimes looks like bleak territory indeed. As News Editor I waged an ill-advised (hysterical, screaming, viciously juvenile) telephone battle with my editor and friend Telis Demos over what I believed was a poorly-reported editorial that would alienate my news sources and make my job impossible. If News is going to pretend to be objective, I shrieked, why should the vehicle of our journalism take official opinions?
But more often I’ve resented that I couldn’t write for the opinion page myself. I wanted to pen livid letters to this page, to tear into the editorial board and their columnists and their letter writers for assessments I believed were wrong.
I waited for this senior column. I waited, and I schemed.
Last spring, as hundreds of students did time on Low Steps to protest racism on campus and the utter failure of the University’s supposed support systems for students of color, I imagined I’d use my column to slam the editorial board for their subheadline describing Columbia’s racial climate as “Better than Most.”
Other times I imagined filling the space with a flock of baby letters responding to other student commentators. One would beg Nikil Saval to quit enshrining cosmopolitanism. One would tell Karyn Lukoff and Yi-Sheng Ng that their personal identity politics shouldn’t let Columbia Queer Alliance off the hook for marginalizing the politics of race. One would rip Tao Tan’s self-righteous screeds to shreds. Oh, would I bring it all home.
Now that time has come, and I’ve got very little to say.
In these intense, strange, bittersweet last months, I’ve finally gotten it through my head that my mode of belonging to this university hasn’ been a preacher mode or a crusader mode or even the traditional kind of activist mode. It’s been a reporter mode.
I care a lot about politics. I want things to be just. But the best way for me to work for justice has been through a kind of civic journalism—the practice of seeking out, listening to, and amplifying those voices that university press releases ignore.
Civic journalism isn’t really objective. Objectivity is one of the only things James Romoser will never be able to make me believe in. But civic journalism has its own system of ethics, and it’s a system I’ll take out into the world with me in two weeks.
So the thing I’ll miss most about Columbia is not classes (I’ll do more of those) or activism (I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to do that) or Butler room 403. What I’ll miss most is this newspaper. It will be to my news section, this tiny ethical universe that Katherine and Telis and James and Katie and Meg and Matt and Jimmy and Morgan made, that I can’t go home again.
Spectator—not the third-floor newsroom, not the daily rag, but the group of people who have made up our staff for the past four years—has given me a way to work toward James Baldwin called “bearing witness.”
I love you guys. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.