With the exception of Groucho Marx deciding which club to join, people don’t like people who don’t want them around. That includes us journalists. When we knock on doors we want them to open.
Holliday and Macias didn’t get into the First Amendment question, which might mean that on the streets of Chicago, unlike in Mizzou’s Carnahan Quad, it didn’t come up. The First Amendment is actually a fairly useless weapon for reporters to go into battle with. “Ma’am,” said Tai at one point, “the First Amendment protects your right to be here, and mine.” He was right about that, but the students confronting him weren’t persuaded, and in the heat of the moment I doubt if anyone in Chicago would have been either. We feel our freedoms viscerally, and demonstrators in both places obviously were feeling their own.
Journalists don’t do their work by quoting lawbooks, but by giving an inch here and accepting two there. They do it by making themselves familiar. One of the skills reporters are most proud of—if they ever acquire it—is the knack of persuading the subjects they confront that they’re different from all those other reporters who show up, write the story already in their heads, and disappear. But better that we dis ourselves as our own worst enemies than we dis the people we’ve come to cover.
