Here are the concluding paragraphs of yesterday’s NBC News story, “Columbia University Protesters Resume Demonstrations After Mass Arrests”:
Is this really a fair and objective summary of what happened at the Chemerinsky dinner? “Confronting a Muslim student,” without further explanation, strongly implies that the student was confronted because he is Muslim, rather than for attempting to give a speech in the middle of a social occasion. I know of no evidence that Dean Chemerinsky or Professor Fisk (they are married) targeted the student for her religion, rather than her destructive conduct.
If you want an analogy, imagine that there was a controversy over the police arrest of someone who was Catholic for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic, and that the incident was characterized (not to mention the bad person’s conduct) such as “Last week, Berkeley officials confronted a Catholic on a city sidewalk.” Would this be a correct journalistic summary?
I think the USC discussion should have been framed differently, too: The student’s speech was deleted, I believe, because she had expressed support for starkly anti-Israel views in the past, and I expect there would have been comparable outrage against her if he had it was a non-Muslim who expressed such views. The most accurate way to describe the incident would be to describe her as someone who had expressed anti-Israel views. (Likewise, if pro-Israel Jewish students are being targeted for being pro-Israel, I think the coverage of that incident should accurately characterize them as pro-Israel students, not as Jews.) But the Berkeley situation makes me it seems even more clearly misdescribed.