With both the current and incoming Editorial Board members of The Bottom Line newspaper packed into a tight circle within the Annex’s small media center room, Anjali was effectively squeezed onto the floor. On the verge of tears, the Opinions Editor shared her experience of having a reporter abruptly confront her during a moment of grieving to give a statement on this past May’s Isla Vista tragedy. That night, the Ed Boards were primarily focused on addressing how we dealt with the rampage that had occurred just days earlier, and Anjali’s heart-wrenching account poignantly demonstrated the Board’s stance that unrestrained reporting on traumatic events within an affected community is not ethical journalistic practice.
The sheer scale and intensity of the IV tragedy, in addition to how painfully close to home it was — physically, socially, emotionally — had greatly affected our ability to handle covering it. Given the explicit danger of immediately reporting and utter lack of reliable information to be found in the immediate aftermath, TBL produced only very light coverage right off the bat. Wanting to address these circumstances right away, a handful of Ed Board members, understandably in an emotionally compromised state, ran a letter to the editor from a former Executive Content Editor stating that we wanted to minimize the physical and emotional harm to our reporting staff. One of the effects was criticism for not adhering to a news organization’s primary function of delivering the facts and information of important events, including a stark juxtaposition with a rival paper which had, from the very start, put out reports (though they were, ironically, woefully inaccurate and misleading). Until Storke Tower sounded its single 1 AM tone, current and new TBL editors and directors emotionally discussed how they had juggled journalistic responsibilities while awaiting updates on friends’ safety and articulated the nuances of reporting on traumatic events to a traumatized readership — a journalistic debate the tragedy sparked around the country. Word by consequential word, this emotionally weary group of journalists crafted an editorial acknowledging our original, rash judgments and outlining our belief that it would be disrespectful to our readership to inundate them with excessive coverage of an event that arguably traumatized them — that, under these circumstances, our obligation to our readership’s sensitivities and emotional states came before our normal obligation to report the news.
I was no longer criticizing the media’s shameful flooding of the streets of Newtown, Connecticut with news vans nor John King’s cringe-worthy Boston bombing reporting snafus, but actively thrust into the foray of setting policy for engaging with my peers in order to prevent these kinds of media outrages. Amidst the fierce debates and emotional anecdotes swirling within the Annex, the media-consumer relationship had been abruptly flipped in a very personal way. The resulting editorial was not only a manifestation of our engagement with a subset of society, but emerged from a process that served as a tutorial for what it means to be civically engaged.
Voting, attending political rallies, and writing to city councilmembers were no longer the nebulous heart of what it meant to be civically engaged; as the incoming Opinions Editor at the time, I realized that I was, from the comfort of my own chair, a consciously civically engaged person who could foster this engagement in others. The articles I come up with and help my writers develop stimulate people’s ways of thinking about issues that affect society. Along with the news section, I (and the writers) allow our readers to be up to date and engaged with issues and on-goings that affect us and provide a basis for action that can influence these same issues and on-goings. Providing the tools for others to be informed and take action is my form of civic engagement.
Concrete actions that are aimed at shaping the phenomena that affect us require information and motivation — some sort of spark to think and do, a type of civic engagement on one party’s part that facilitates engagement on another’s. Seeing firsthand the different ways even two different newspapers on the same campus can engage readers on the same, significant issue demonstrated, however, that not all of these sparks and resulting actions can be enlightening or constructive. A rant by Rush Limbaugh that inspires a listener to actively campaign against marriage equality is civic engagement on both ends of the rant just as much as a TBL news piece informing a student enough to inspire her to initiate a community composting program is. As an editor with the ability not just to be civically engaged myself but to facilitate civic engagement in others, I’ve come to realize that my job is more than simply persuading people and providing an opinion, but fostering positive intellectual and action-oriented engagement with society and its issues.
From Ideas to Paper 