A fair amount of the reaction to University of Missouri student protesters’ demand for a “safe space” that’s free from journalists boils down to a contemptuous What don’t these people understand about the First Amendment? I’ve seen this point made more than once by graduates (I’m one) of the university’s famous school of journalism. A second reaction (see columnist Jonah Goldberg’s reference to “delicate little flowers”) has been What don’t these babies understand about growing up?
And what about Schierbecker? Is he even a journalist, or was he merely impersonating one? Or can any student barge into another’s private space and claim a First Amendment right to take pictures?
Students in the video were asking photographer Tim Tai to respect their privacy. You and other journalists immediately took the First Amendment angle, but why not take the ethics angle? Besides, how long were the members of the press kept at bay? Was it “constitutionally unjust” to ask them to wait until their sources were ready to talk to them or be photographed? Ultimately, did journalists get their story and their pictures? Judging from Tai’s pictures, he got what he needed.
This absence troubles the professor who wrote me. It doesn’t bother me. Now that I’m thinking twice about Schierbecker’s video, what I see is strong evidence that both the university and the students kept their cool. For all the attention that’s been paid to the students’ my-face-in-your-face confrontation with Tai, I don’t see anything in the video that remotely suggests a tinderbox in need of crowd control. Police flooding a scene where they’re not needed don’t keep the peace—they jeopardize it. A large police presence could have inflamed and insulted the protesters.
There’s another wave of commentary that challenges the first sneering, “delicate little flowers” view of safe spaces and coddled students. It’s made me think twice. “Since I was not there, I called someone who was,” wrote the Tribune‘s Clarence Page Friday. Page called Ashley Holt, a broadcast major who’s president of the Missouri chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists. Safe space or a free press? Page asked her, and the trouble with her heretical answer is that it makes some sense. “My personal choice was to respect the space,” she told Page.
A year ago I wrote a piece about a book that’s a collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning photography, The Pulitzer Prize Photographs: Capture the Moment. It’s a study in ends justifying means. Along with the photos there’s text in which the photographers discuss how they got that picture. “Guess what!” I wrote. “They employed stealth, they concealed information, they defied invitations to get lost. . . . Photography is the job of witness and photographers have a sense of entitlement sufficient to get the job done.” Then again, the paparazzi that harried Princess Di until she was dead also felt entitled. And no Pulitzers there.
