No, Protestors Don't Have to Talk to Media

Elite journalists aren't entitled to student's voices.

Ronald Reagan and his partisan hack speechwriter Peggy Noonan, 1988

Mainstream media figures have been lambasting student protestors for being reluctant to talk to mainstream media figures. Wall Street Journal sinecure holder, and former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, tried to speak to a protestor at Columbia who declined because she was not media-trained; Noonan sneered that the student would have spoken to her but “her friends gave her a look and she conformed.”  New York Times White House correspondent highlighted the incident on twitter and used it to sweepingly denounce the protestors and their cause. “When protests are not about actually explaining your cause or trying to engage journalists who are there to listen.”

Noonan suggests that the student protestors are dittoheads just going along with the herd, rather than brave independent thinkers like herself. Baker argues that the protestors are confused and insular and unwilling to reach out to those outside their bubble. Both of them assume that mainstream journalists deserve unlimited access, and that the Noonans and Bakers of the world are entitled to interpret and rule upon the meaning and tactics of student protest. They are irritated at the students for not properly performing their role—which is to provide content on demand for elite journalists.

Many in the media, in short, see the protests as a personal affront—which means their criticisms of the protestors are fundamentally in bad faith. That bad faith is built into patriarchy, and into colonialism, both of which have very specific norms around who gets to speak and who is supposed to express deference.

—

If I were paywalling this post, this is where the paywall would be. But! I’d rather everyone could read it. So if you find this post helpful/interesting/valuable, and keep reading, consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can keep scribbling.

—

Peter Baker Won’t Discuss NYT Coverage of Trans Issues

Students at some protests won’t talk to media because the protestors are trying to stay focused on their demands for university divestment from Israel, and on a ceasefire in Gaza. These are important issues, and the students don’t want to have their struggle or their demands undermined by someone saying the wrong thing or expressing political opinions or ideas that are not part of the focus of the protests as a whole.

Baker and Noonan act as if the students are engaging is some sort of bizarre messaging innovation. But of course the opposite is the case. Virtually all organizations—and especially all organizations engaged in political advocacy on controversial issues—identify trained, professional spokespeople to talk to the press.

If you call up the Mayor’s office in the City of Chicago and say you are a reporter, the person who answers the phone will not answer your questions about (for instance) anything. They will direct you to a press spokesperson. If you walk into the offices of Planned Parenthood, and ask people walking by for an interview, they are going to tell you, politely, that they can’t speak for the org, and they will direct you to a press spokesperson. No doubt secretaries, accountants, and administrators at Planned Parenthood or at the Mayor’s office have lots of thoughts about how the office is run, what the mission is, what could be done better. But they do not share those willy nilly with reporters because they care about the mission, or don’t want to be fired, or some combination of those things.

Or to use an example closer to home; on twitter I asked Peter Baker if he could comment on the way the New York Times treats trans people in its pages. He didn’t reply, perhaps because he didn’t feel like it (as students may not feel like talking to reporters.) Or, perhaps he didn’t reply because he’s an employee and doesn’t speak for the paper that employs him—and because if he did speak for the paper in that way, he might say something that harmed the paper, or harmed him.

Students who designate spokespeople are not refusing to engage with the public or with the press. They are instead demonstrating discipline and care by trying to take control of their own message in the way that virtually every other organization that deals with the press tries to control their own message.

Double Bind

Lots of media reports have framed the protestors as undisciplined and unfocused. President Joe Biden echoed many reporters when he said the protests were spreading “chaos.” You’d think reporters would be impressed, or at least interested, in evidence that students have thought seriously about messaging, have provided for press training, and have committed to work together in a conscious and deliberate way.

Instead, students are caught in a double bind. If they act individually without coordination, they are accused of being wild feral hippies breaking stuff at random. If they demonstrate organization and collective commitment, they’re accused of being totalitarians stifling conformity. They can’t win.

Feminist critic and theorist Julia Serano has argued that when you find a double bind, you tend to find prejudice. Serano argues that certain identities (women, Black people, sex workers) are stigmatized and marked. Once an identity is marked in this way, anything that someone with that identity does is seen as evidence of inequity, or as justification for the stigma. For instance, a plumber has no particular marked identity, so when a plumber has a mental illness, no one thinks, “Aha, of course this plumber has a mental illness; that’s just like those plumbers!” But if a sex worker, has a mental illness, it’s seen as the inevitable consequences of the debased nature of sex work.

These dynamics of stigma and marking inevitably result in double binds, because whatever you do when you are stigmatized is seen as confirmation of your failures and iniquity. If a woman says she enjoys sex, she’s attacked for being immoral; if she doesn’t talk about enjoying sex, she’s attacked for being frigid. If a Black person doesn’t do well in school, it’s considered a sign of the failures of Black culture; if a Black person does do well in school, they’re attacked for taking positions from white people or for getting above themselves. You can’t win.

Young people are stigmatized

We don’t generally think of young people as a stigmatized or marked group. But the way Baker and Noonan talk about them, it’s quite clear that they are. Young people are seen as both foolish and weak (they need to “toughen up”) and as dangerously aggressive and violent terrorists.  They’re both unthinking conformists and dangerously contemptuous of authority. Noonan even weirdly objectifies the protestor she interacts with (“a beautiful girl of about 20,”) mirroring the ways in which marginalized people (women, trans people, sex workers) are often objectified and treated as if their appearance is more important than what they have to say.

The stigma here is also, I think, because the young people in question are standing in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians are intertwined groups which are all regularly demeaned and pilloried in the American public and the American press. That’s part of why the US has continued to align with Israel even as Israel has killed some 35,000 civilians in Gaza, and threatens with the invasion of Rafah to kill hundreds of thousands more.

Who gets to control whose speech

As many analysts have pointed out, stigmatized people are often denied a voice—both in the sense that they are shut out of many public venues, and in the sense that when they speak (to say they have been sexually abused, to say that they have been targeted by police, to say that they are being dispossessed) they are not believed. Foucault has also pointed out that the control of other’s speech is not just through silence, but through forcing confessions and demanding testimony as self-incrimination. When your voice is not yours, that means you don’t speak for yourself—but it also means you are forced to speak by and for others.

Elite journalists demand that students speak where and when elite journalists tells them too. Noonan and Baker frame these demands as in the student’s best interest (for independence, for getting their message across.) But the real demand is that students speak when, where, and how their betters tell them to. Noonan and Baker feel entitled to student voices and to student deference. Students—as young people, as stand-ins for Palestinians—are marginalized, stigmatized, lesser. When they insist on autonomy, and on the right to speak when and how they wish, they are threatening patriarchal and colonial hierarchies. They must be put in their place.

The fact that Noonan and Baker feel that students are, and should remain, beneath them is exactly why students don’t trust mainstream media, and why they feel that it is imperative to control and limit press access. Having designated press representatives is a pragmatic decision. But it’s also, in this context, a statement of respect for Palestinians, and of self-respect for students. The right to speak is vital. But there is no right to speak, and no right to privacy or dignity, without the right to silence.