Stanford politics magazine STANFORDPOLITICS.ORG APRIL 2018 | ISSUE 04
DIALOGUE AS ALIBI BEYOND THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS
+SHOULD THE DAILY PRINT DAILY? +ANTI-ANTI FASCISM +SILICON VALLEY’S MEDIA DESERT +A CONVERSATION WITH COLIN KAHL
Your weekly rundown of Stanford news and commentary on campus, local, US, and world politics. STANFORDPOLITICS.ORG/MONDAYMEMO
CONTENTS
DOES THE DAILY NEED TO PRINT DAILY?
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DANIELA GONZALEZ & LUCAS RODRIGUEZ
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ANTI-ANTI-FASCISM The [Character] “Assassination” of Professor David Palumbo-Liu AMBER YANG
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DIALOGUE AS ALIBI
Beyond the Marketplace of Ideas TRUMAN CHEN & JOSH LAPPEN
“OBAMA THOUGHT ABOUT AMERICAN LEADERSHIP IN A MUCH MORE COMPREHENSIVE WAY”
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A Conversation with Colin Kahl JAKE DOW
SILICON VALLEY’S MEDIA DESERT
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EMILY LEMMERMAN
EDITOR’S NOTE While this issue of Stanford Politics Magazine is not necessarily a special edition like the last, there is somewhat of a common theme among most of the articles. The first asks a question that we should all, as effectively paying subscribers of the Stanford Daily, be asking: Should it be printing everyday? It seems, quite straightforwardly, that the answer is no. As a former Daily staffer myself and having some of my closest friends among its leadership ranks, it saddens me to see stacks of newspapers across campus every evening, untouched and ready to be replaced by new stacks in the morning. But it pains me even more to see The Daily scratching the bottom of the barrel for content to publish each day — from the abominable “Grind” lifestyle blog to the unoriginal and lazy paraphrasings of Stanford News press releases. What our campus needs and deserves is a rigorous, investigative student newspaper. Daniela Gonzalez and Lucas Rodriguez discuss how reducing print frequency could help The Daily become more capable of being just that. The cover story, co-written by our former editor Truman Chen and Josh Lappen, calls out the Stanford Review and Stanford’s Cardinal Conversations initiative for perpetuating the myth that there is an intellectual void on campus that needs to and can be filled with mere “dialogue.” Promoting free speech is certainly valuable (and imperative), but promoting all speech as valuable is simply negligent as an educational institution. As a former advisor (briefly) to Cardinal Conversations, I couldn’t agree more that our student body deserves — and must demand — better. Our last article argues that while national outlets like CNN, the Atlantic, and the New York Times are redoubling their focus on Silicon Valley, the local journalism industry is withering away, and that brings with it consequences. To billionaire entrepreneurs who express interest in fighting fake news and promoting the public interest, Emily Lemmerman offers a suggestion: fund real, local news.
Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna Editor-in-Chief
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MASTHEAD EDITOR IN CHIEF RUAIRÍ ARRIETA-KENNA
MAGAZINE DIRECTOR DANIELA GONZALEZ
CHIEF OF STAFF MADDIE MCCONKEY
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER LANDON ELLINGSON
ASSOCIATE EDITORS RALEIGH BROWNE SEJAL JHAWER EMILY KATZ SIERRA MACIOROWSKI REBECCA SMALBACH BROOKE TEFERRA JULIAN WATROUS AMBER YANG
MANAGING EDITOR JAKE DOW
PHOTO EDITOR AMELIA LELAND
SENIOR EDITORS ALLIE DOW JONATHAN FAUST ELLIOT KAUFMAN
GRAPHIC DESIGN & LAYOUT NATHALIE KIERSZNOWSKI ASA KOHRMAN TAYLOR SIHAVONG DANIEL WU LEA ZAWADA
Special thanks to Emily Lemmerman for copy editing assistance.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS OF “DIALOGUE AS ALIBI” Truman Chen is a coterminal master’s student in modern thought & literature, and hegraduated with a B.A. in history in 2017. He also served as the editor in chief of Stanford P olitics from 2015-2017. His interests include modern Chinese history, cinemaand photography, global intellectual history, and pop criticism.
Josh Lappen is a coterminal master’s student pursuing a B.A. in classics and an M.S. in atmosphere/energy engineering. Next year, he will continue his studies in American environmental history at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. His interests include climate policy, diving, and backpacking.
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DOES THE DAILY NEED TO PRINT DAILY? DANIELA GONZALEZ & LUCAS RODRIGUEZ
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ollege newspapers serve to inform campus communities, provide youthful perspectives on national and global news, and offer budding reporters and media executives the opportunity to hone their craft. But American print journalism is withering away, and college papers are no exception. They face the same challenges that plague professional organizations, and they, too, must find new ways to remain sustainable. US daily newspaper circulation declined 8 percent in 2016, the 28th year in a row that daily papers across the country experienced some sort of decline in circulation. And as circulation has decreased, so has advertising revenue, falling an extraordinary 63 percent from 2005 to 2016. The share of revenue from digital ads is on the rise, but many giants of the industry still must rely on a subscription model. Avid readers, for example, must pay to read more than 10 articles per month in the New York Times, or more than seven in the Washington Post. As The Times noted in “Project 2020,” a recent, forward-looking report on their strategy and aspirations: Despite a recent upturn in subscribers, even more subscriptions are necessary for the long-term sustainability of the institution. The report also noted that to attract subscribers, the quality of the paper’s content matters: “The Times publishes about 200 pieces of journalism every day. This number typically includes some of the best work published anywhere. It also includes too many stories that lack significant impact or audience — that do not help make The Times a valuable destination.” In experimenting with new ways of presenting stories and engaging readers, The Times hopes to “prove that there is a digital model for original, time-consuming, boots-on-the-ground, expert reporting that the
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world needs.” But a student newspaper cannot resort to such a “subscription-first business.” With a small fraction of the number of readers national newspapers attract, college papers would not be wise to implement paywalls. There doesn’t seem to be much of a demand among college students for paid campus news. Not to mention, such a move would be antithetical to the mission of these organizations — presumably, to freely provide their respective campus communities with important news. So without the digital-subscription tool at their disposal, how are college papers to deal with the problems plaguing the journalism world? It’s a vexing question, and one that has surely long been on the minds of undergraduate editorial boards across the country. The Stanford Daily is, of course, one of the many papers grappling with this exact question. For over 125 years, The Daily has been Stanford’s go-to news source, but it is not immune to the broader trend of revenue struggles. Is The Daily doing enough to innovate in the face of these challenges? The Daily circulates 8,000 papers every day to over 500 locations on campus and across the greater Palo Alto area. Perhaps we should question the frequency of its printing. The demands of daily printing should not be understated; it requires students — on top of their full-time academic responsibilities — to have the time to write, edit, and layout stories they believe the community needs on a daily basis. Cutting printing frequency at The Daily might allow those dedicated student journalists to refocus such valuable time and energy on other pursuits, ones that may increase the quality of the paper’s content, for the betterment of both campus and The Daily itself.
STANFORD DAILY
FROM INK TO INC.
itors and the operating costs associated with running a newspaper make up the principal financial obligations of The Stanford Daily. Meeting these obligations obviously requires money. Before esn 1973, The Daily made the conscious decision to legally septablishing The Publishing Corporation, the paper’s official status as arate itself from the ASSU, and consequently, the university. Up until that point, the paper had operated as a sort of sub- an ASSU/university affiliate meant it could utilize ASSU/universisidiary of the ASSU (which was then still a group officially associat- ty funds and employees to run its business. Though a large chunk ed with the university). This relationship naturally led to concerns of money always came from advertising revenue generated from over the journalistic integrity of the paper, beginning with its cov- the physical papers (and more recently, from the website, the email erage of student activism on campus throughout the 1960s and 70s. newsletter, and the magazine), this source has never been enough These stories often created tensions between university officials and to fully sustain the paper. The ASSU/university would always make the student editors, and as these tensions grew, many Daily writers up the difference with their respective contributions, but separaworried the university’s affiliation with the ASSU could allow them tion meant The Daily would ostensibly no longer have easy access to punish The Daily financially, or otherwise impede its ability to to these funds. Nevertheless, The Publishing Company still receives function. This formal relationship between the parties also meant money from both groups. As students, we vote every year to give the university could potentially be held liable for any of The Daily’s The Daily (via The Publishing Corporation) $100,000 in “subscripactions. Thus, on Feb. 1, 1973, The Daily established “The Stanford tion fees.” Current COO of The Daily Do-Hyoung Park additionally Daily Publishing Corporation,” a fully incorporated California told Stanford Politics that The Corporation collects an additional 501(c)(3) non-profit group meant to take over all responsibilities $60,000-80,000 in subscription fees from the university, a stipend related to running the newspaper. meant to cover the “subscription” of faculty and staff. However, adThese responsibilities are, by no means, trivial. Separating them- vertising remains the major revenue source for The Daily. selves from the university editorially also meant separating themAs a 501(c)(3), all of The Stanford Daily Publishing Company’s selves financially. Leaders of The Daily now had to figure out how IRS filings from fiscal years 2002-2016 are available online through to sustain their group as business, on top of writing and editing ProPublica’s nonprofit explorer. According to this data, The Daily’s stories to be printed every day. To aid in these efforts, they have advertising revenue has been declining just as national newspaper since established two full-time positions within The Publishing revenue advertising has. From 2011-2016 alone, advertising reveCorporation, a Chief Operating Officer (COO) and a Chief Revenue fell a drastic 45.5 percent, with subscription revenues remainnue Officer (CRO). The COO and CRO — usually recent graduates who were in- ing relatively constant during the same period at around $163,000. volved with the editorial side as students — handle everything The Daily has tried to make up for these lost revenues in new and from advertising to marketing to printing and much more. Accord- creative ways. Park told Stanford Politics that this year the organiingly, in addition to taking on the general operating expenses of zation took over the handling of the yearbook (after the dissolution the paper (including daily printing, typesetting, and the like), the of The Quad) and launched a Snapchat Discover story in attempts Publishing Corporation pays these two (and the editors in chief) to make more money. Despite these efforts, The Publishing Company’s expenses have yearly salaries. Taken together, the compensation of employees/edexceeded their revenue every year since FY2012. Practically this trend is not as concerning as it would be for non-campus newspapers — The Daily does not necessarily need to financially compensate its writers. But, it does reveal that The Daily is subject to the same forces 600K afflicting newspapers across the country. And where better than in college newsrooms should innovative ways to reduce costs in journalism be tested? One of the ways some campus papers are tackling this is by re400K ducing their printing. How would cutting printing frequency affect the Stanford Daily’s numbers? We can’t be sure. It would certainly aid their expense burden, but it would also 200K hurt their income, for less printing means less advertising revenue. Still, it may be an option worth considering. Aside from the potential financial benefits 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 that could be gained from cutting print, it’s also worth looking at how cutting print may impact the quality of The Stanford Daily’s advertising revenue in recent years. stories The Daily publishes.
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ADVERTISING REVENUE
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STANFORD DAILY
STORIES, EVERYDAY
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rinting everyday is understandably difficult. Printing everyday on a college campus is even more difficult. On top of having to write, edit, typeset, print, and deliver papers every night and morning, student journalists have the added difficulty of actually finding newsworthy stories to fill their pages. The nature of the campus setting is such that the demands of daily printing exceed the news value of stories that occur. In an interview with Stanford Politics, The Daily’s current editor in chief, Hannah Knowles, noted that, “There are definitely days where we need to fill a hole in the paper,” and that consequently, “last-minute articles that aren’t the level of research we would typically want for a lot of our content” find their way into the paper’s pages. It’s more than just these “last-minute articles” that one finds in a copy of The Daily. Pick up any copy and you’ll likely notice lightly paraphrased Stanford News press releases and ‘The Grind’ (The Daily’s campus lifestyle column established back in 2015) combine to make up a considerable portion of each day’s paper. In relative terms, actual original news stories don’t take up as much space as one would think or hope. But again this may be no fault of The Daily’s reporters; there likely aren’t as many immediately obvious stories worth printing everyday. Once more, none of this is to say that The Daily does not produce content worth reading. They provide unrivaled coverage of campus events and some of the most detailed stories on virtually every sports team. Nonetheless, journalism isn’t just about covering events, sports, and the day-to-day going-ons of a country, city, or campus. Journalism’s real bread and butter lies in unearthing those stories that no one knows about, that nobody has fully put together yet. At the end of the day, newspapers make their names by breaking stories that matter, that make waves. On this front, The Daily regrettably struggles. Indeed, if you ask a Stanford student where they usually read these kinds of stories, The Daily probably and unfortunately wouldn’t be the first publication to come mind. Instead, students are likely to think of The Fountain Hopper. The FoHo (as it is commonly referred to) made its name early on in its existence by discovering in 2015 (and reporting on) a legal loophole that allowed Stanford students to gain access to their admissions files. It has since garnered a reputation for being a place students and administrators alike can go to with tips on big stories. FoHo writers broke a recent story about a Dartmouth Rower suspected of drugging people at a Sigma Chi party, and they were first to report that Stanford suggested writing, “I’m okay, everything’s okay,” on the plaque at the site of the Brock Turner assault instead of the phrases desired by the victim. Most importantly, The FoHo was the first publication to break the Brock Turner assault, a staggering nine days after the crime. Where was The Daily on each of these? How did Stanford’s preeminent student publication, with all its resources, miss these massive stories? Yes, students probably think to go to The FoHo with tips before they think of The Daily, but that doesn’t preclude The Daily from actively seeking these stories out with the kind of “time-consuming, boots-on-the-ground” reporting that The New
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York Times strives for. Yet, it’s the “time-consuming” nature of this reporting that’s prohibitive. The time and effort needed to print a paper every day detracts from The Daily’s ability to pursue this sort of impact journalism. Daily editor in chief Hannah Knowles summed it up well, telling Stanford Politics how, “Being a daily print paper means that you can’t just invest all your resources in the really big stories...We don’t operate like the FoHo where they work intensively on their things for months.” Knowles did note that “a big priority of mine and our priority last volume as well was how to shift some more of our resources into longer-term things where we’re really getting stories of impact.” Cutting print, as some other college papers around the country have already done, would most certainly allow The Daily to commit more resources to this priority.
PRINTING IN PERSPECTIVE
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n the midst of “Big Game Week” in Nov. 2017, The Stanford Daily gently teased UC Berkeley’s The Daily Cal in an exchange on Twitter. “Oh right - your ‘daily’ paper is only four times a week,” The Stanford Daily’s account posted. Although the tweets were all in good fun, they illuminate a salient reality: Cutting print is often perceived as a sign of weakness. Newspapers cut back on print because they are struggling financially or cannot produce enough content. The Stanford Daily does not fall into either of these categories, nor does it want to. The Daily’s printing practices are perhaps best examined in the context of student publications at other universities. In fact, many of The Daily’s peers have recently opted to change the number of
A Twitter exchange between The Stanford Daily and The Daily Cal.
STANFORD DAILY copies and frequency with which they print for a variety of different reasons. One of the most drastic print reductions in recent years took place 45K Copies / day at Columbia Daily Spectator, the 40K student newspaper at Columbia Total enrollment University, home to one of the top 35K graduate journalism programs in the country. About three and half 30K years ago, Spectator moved from 25K printing every day to just once a week in an effort to boost news 20K quality and better serve the organization’s mission. The decision made 15K Columbia the only Ivy League school without a daily student-run 10K print newspaper, eliciting mixed re5K sponses from alumni. But accordTufts UCLA Berkeley Syracuse Stanford Yale ing to then-editor in chief Abby Abrams, the move had little to do with the paper’s finances; rather, Copies printed per day at other college newspapers compared to total enrollment. they aimed to allow all “writers and editors to produce the best content possible.” Abrams also told Politico that she hoped to “make the decision while Spectator [was] these stresses. Despite Spectator’s success, most other campus publications still in a strong place.” In 2016, Spectator updated its alumni on the results of this re- have opted for a more mild approach. In 2016, the Daily Tar Heel duction — an apparent success. In the note, editor in chief Caro- at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, cut their Tuesday line Chiu said that “since the transition in the fall of 2014, we have edition, moving from five print days a week to four. “We’ve cut a higher engagement with both our print and digital editions… The day out of print, but that doesn’t affect the work we’re doing,” forincreased impact isn’t the result of magic; it’s because the staff is mer editor in chief Jane Wester wrote in a column announcing the now more productive and doing higher quality work… Our stories change. “We are interested in pushing boundaries — making our work more interactive and more social online.” are better, and the University community has noticed.” The University of Pennsylvania’s the Daily Pennsylvanian Chiu also said the change allowed Spectator staff to be more dropped their Friday paper in 2014. Syracuse’s the Daily Orange thoughtful and intentional about the stories they published. made an even more moderate change in 2008, choosing to cut the “The freedom to not force a story into publication because we Friday paper while still occasionally publishing special sports edihad to fill pages in a daily print edition allowed us to take a step tions on Fridays. That same year, UC Berkeley’s The Daily Califorback and redefine for ourselves what Spectator’s mission is and what we aspire to in successful storytelling,” she said. “We have (re) nian announced it would no longer be printing on Wednesdays. learned how to push ourselves to do real journalism, a shift that These aren’t the only examples — other universities at which stushould be credited to a renewed focus on staff development and dent newspapers have chosen to roll back print editions include the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University, the Univertraining.” Regardless of their financial state, many college papers are lim- sity of Maryland, the University of Georgia, the University of Oreited by the unyielding requirement to print newspapers on a daily gon, Duke University, and the University of Texas-Austin, among basis. Although long hours and late nights are the norm for student many others — but they are particularly notable because the Daily journalists no matter their publication’s printing practices, shifting Pennsylvanian and the Daily Californian are arguably among the to a weekly model gave those at Spectator a newfound, “freedom,” nation’s best student newspapers, remaining so despite of (and posas described by Chiu. Primarily, it eliminated the constant physical sibly because of) their reduced print frequency. necessity to fill space on a page. Web journalism is much more flexible because article length and available space are rarely a concern online. Once “daily” publications can still publish at a similar — if not higher — frequency after choosing to cut back on print, but ven when compared to publications that have continued such a shift will remove the need to hastily add otherwise dispensto print on a daily basis, The Stanford Daily’s current pracable fluff pieces to the paper. The Stanford Daily is no stranger to tice of printing 8,000 copies a day still appears excessive.
DAILY DISTRIBUTION & TOTAL ENROLLMENT
THE CASE FOR CUTTING PRINT
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STOCK PHOTO Think of all the times you’ve seen a stack of untouched Stanford Daily newspapers around campus.
Consider, for instance, UCLA’s daily student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, one of the most highly-acclaimed campus newspapers in the country. Despite serving nearly three times as many students as The Stanford Daily — UCLA’s 2016 total enrollment was 44,947 compared to Stanford’s 16,914 in 2017 — The Bruin prints 9,000 copies a day, only 1,000 more than The Daily. These numbers don’t take into account the faculty, staff, and off-campus readers the publications also serve (though those are also likely greater for UCLA), but they give a good rough approximation of a college paper’s distribution-to-readership ratio. Still, UCLA is but one example, and a very different one at that, so it is important to also examine The Daily in relation to more similar publications. The Daily Orange prints 6,000 copies a day with approximately 22,500 students enrolled at Syracuse; the Yale Daily News prints 5,000 copies a day for a little over 12,300 students; and the Tufts Daily prints 1,500 copies a day for about 11,500 students. Although print-to-enrollment ratios vary among top college dailies, Stanford’s remains one of the highest. Think back to all the times you’ve seen a thick stack of untouched Stanford Daily newspapers at the entrance of your dorm or dining hall, or in newsstands at the student unions or along the Main Quad. Of course, cutting back on the number of copies printed a day doesn’t do much in terms of giving newspaper staff more time or flexibility. However, it could potentially free up monetary resources for better use. According to Hannah Knowles and Do-Hyoung
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Park, The Daily currently uses all the money it receives from the ASSU and the university to cover its printing costs. But what if these costs could be reduced? On one hand, this could simply lead to a small decrease in student fees and wasted paper. But $100,000 — as substantial as it sounds — is not an unusual amount of special fees for a student group as large and established as The Daily. A wiser approach could be to use the same amount of funding for more innovative initiatives. What if, for instance, The Daily put some portion of the student fees it receives towards further developing their online presence and determining how to better engage the undergraduate population through digital journalism? Or what if it invested in the tools necessary for deep, prolonged investigative work? In either case, a reallocation of resources — time and money — could be valuable for the paper’s future. Park additionally provided some insight into how the 8,000 copies a day were decided upon, noting that cuts have taken place in the past. “It used to be the case that The Stanford Daily was a major newspaper serving the greater San Francisco Peninsula,” Park said. “And then, as it became more localized to the Stanford area, corresponding cuts were made. I can’t exactly give a specific timeline, but it settled on 8,000 as kind of a solid equilibrium where we felt like the 8,000 papers are still being read.” The all-too-pervasive stacks of unread, still-rubber-banded Stanford Daily newspapers strewn across campus beg to differ. As any Stanford student can safely say, 8,000 copies of The Daily are certainly not being read every day. There are many reasons for this
STANFORD DAILY decrease in engagement, but one of the foremost is that undergraduates generally seem to prefer consuming Daily content in digital form. “I’m definitely as sad as the next person when I see like a stack of print Dailies sitting around,” Knowles said. “Interestingly, undergrads aren’t our best readers of the print edition… Actually, we have a lot higher print readership among the grad student community.” Park told Stanford Politics about a readership survey conducted last year which supposedly revealed that Stanford faculty, along with some graduate students, found the print editions to be “critical,” whereas interest among undergraduates lagged. “It’s just very tough to engage the undergraduate population at a forward-facing university like Stanford, especially with a print product,” Park said. “So that’s kind of the ongoing question that we’re looking to answer. Is our undergraduate population going to engage with the print product? … What are better ways to engage with them?”
As Park stated, the number of copies printed per day has decreased over the years, and while continuing to chip away at the distribution could free up some resources, ultimately a bigger, more comprehensive change is necessary. The Daily should strongly consider cutting a day — or more — of print in order to re-prioritize and make space for investigative journalism, breaking news, and digital innovation. According to Park, reducing print has been a topic of conversation in recent years. “Talks of cutting print — whether it’s cutting days of print every week or cutting issues from our daily print run — have been in the air for as long as I’ve been here,” he said. However, Park noted that those in charge at The Daily are hesitant to implement actual changes. “Nobody wants to be the one to pull the trigger. This paper has been around for 125 years, and it’s not to say we’re sticking to the past just for the sake of sticking to the past. We have not cut print because we still get good recycle rates off campus, according to our distribution manager, and because we feel like there is engagement with it on campus,” Park said. Knowles similarly referred to decreasing print as an “ongoing discussion.” “I think we’re always considering cutting print, and I know we’ve had some semi-serious discussions about that,” Knowles said. “In the end, it’s not a decision you can make very quickly, so there’s a lot of research that needs to be done before we could figure that out.” The impact of such changes can be seen at Columbia Daily Spectator. The Eye, a weekly features magazine launched by Spectator staff in 2006 has grown significantly since the newspaper cut back on print in 2014. The Eye regularly publishes longform, investigative pieces, providing a glimpse into what the future of The Daily could look like. (The Stanford Daily did launch a magazine last year, and though the intention was admirable, its execution has been lackluster, failing to provide much of the valuable investigative journalism that the format would ideally allow for.) Cutting print is understandably daunting, but the benefits it can afford have proven to be worth the risk for many campus publications. The Daily has experienced a decrease in ad revenue in recent years, and the argument for cutting print is one of finances, but more so, it is also one of quality. Most importantly, it is one of relevance, adaptability, and foresight. Stanford — a leading institution both for its academic excellence and its contributions to technological and social modernization — should be at the cutting edge of journalism’s digital innovation. Rather than being stuck in its superfluous habits of the past, The Daily — Stanford’s oldest and most established student publication — must rethink existing norms and strive to become, as it should be, one of the leading campus newspapers in the country.
“NOBODY WANTS TO BE THE ONE TO PULL THE TRIGGER.”
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Park’s question brings us back to The Fountain Hopper, a publication that describes itself as an “email newsletter that’s offbeat, skeptical, and prizes brevity,” captivating students across campus without fail. Of course, some of The FoHo’s success can be ascribed to reasons beyond the capacities of The Daily, such as its debatably unethical anonymity, irregular email-blast-style of distribution, and penchant for mixing its editorial voice with its reporting. The FoHo receives no money from the university and is protected by its anonymity. Thus it is perceived by many as a sort of publication-gone-rogue that regularly critiques the university and challenges the status quo of student journalism. Its effective branding as a muckraker, however, may do more to influence its belovedness than its actual muckraking. Some of The FoHo’s strongest selling points are well within The Daily’s reach. As much as its unusual image and personality are enticing, The FoHo would be nothing if it weren’t for its ability to break pivotal news and publish thoroughly-researched, in-depth investigative pieces. In order to better engage its undergraduate readers, The Stanford Daily must prioritize these areas. If breaking old habits such as printing every day could lead to more in-depth work, more Daily exclusives, and a more developed digital presence (as it has done for other campus publications, including our own Stanford Politics), then perhaps such a move is worthwhile. The Daily continues to print because it always has and because graduate students, faculty, and people off-campus say they continue to value the print edition. But the driving vision of a college newspaper founded, written, and run primarily by undergraduates should be grounded in the preferences and perspectives of undergraduate students. In light of this, it may be time for The Daily to make a change.
Daniela Gonzalez, a junior studying computer science and English, is the magazine director of Stanford Politics. Lucas Rodriguez, a junior studying political science and economics, is a senior staff writer for Stanford Politics.
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ANTI-ANTI-FASCISM THE [CHARACTER] “ASSASINATION” OF PROFESSOR DAVID PALUMBO-LIU AMBER YANG YOUTUBE / CURIOSITEY92
“Antifa Thugs Find a Champion and Leader in Stanford Professor.” This was the Stanford Review’s headline, sprawled above a photo of ominously masked protesters, for a Jan. article that called for David Palumbo-Liu’s resignation. Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of Comparative Literature and the vice president of the American Comparative Literature Association. In Aug. 2017, he and Bill Mullen, a professor at Purdue University, founded the Campus Antifascist Network (CAN), a group of faculty, staff, and students from universities across the United States who are devoted to opposing the rise of fascism. CAN was created in response to the Charlottesville white nationalist rally last summer that involved the death of a peaceful protester after James Fields, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, drove a car into a crowd of people who supported the removal of a Confederate statue from a park near the University of Virginia. CAN’s initial purpose was to unite those who sought to address the drastic change in political discourse on college campuses since Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency and to create broader discussion of what free speech is. “Donald Trump’s election truly struck me because a large number of people began talking and acting in ways that were quite troublesome,” Palumbo-Liu tells Stanford Politics. “As more and more disturbing events occurred on college campuses — Milo Yiannopoulos [at Berkeley], Richard Spencer at [the University of Florida], and the Charlottesville attack, which was the most graphic and disturbing incident of white supremacist violence on campus — we felt we had to organize something to prevent this type of violence.” However, Palumbo-Liu’s actions led him to be described by The Review as “an antifa ring-leader… championing violent resistance,”
and his organization was called “a chapter of a terrorist group.” This was not the first time Palumbo-Liu was targeted by The Review. Two years ago, he was accused of propagating anti-Semitism in an article entitled “Stanford’s Most Radical Professor Strikes Again.” In an op-ed for the Stanford Daily, Palumbo-Liu said he should have known better this time than to answer The Review’s questions. Palumbo-Liu corresponded with The Review days before the article was published, but his responses to their questions were largely misconstrued. In the Daily piece titled “Why we have free speech on university campuses, and why I will never take a call from the Stanford Review again,” Palumbo-Liu calls The Review’s piece “right-wing propaganda” and “classic yellow journalism.” Of his correspondence with The Review, he writes: “I was recently approached by the Stanford Review to comment on the Campus Antifascist Network… I engaged with the reporter and answered her questions. I even commended her on her astuteness with regard to one question. We were polite, professional. Imagine my surprise, then, when I clicked on the link she sent me and found yet another sensationalistic headline, worthy of any cheap tabloid one might find at the bottom of a shopping cart.” He also condemned The Review’s conflation of antifasicm with antifa violence. Nevertheless, a few days after The Review article was published, its co-author and the editor-in-chief of The Review, Anna Mitchell, appeared on a segment of Fox & Friends where she expressed no remorse for its accusations, claiming, “If any professor tried to start a ‘campus alternative right network’ and claimed that it was not affiliated with the alt-right, he would be laughed out of his seat.”
ANTI-ANTI-FASCISM The questions Mitchell asked of Palumbo-Liu, by email, before the article was published — as well as his responses — are copied and stylized below, courtesy of Palumbo-Liu:
Anna Mitchell: Were you present at the Berkeley Milo Yiannopoulos protests? David Palumbo-Liu: Not at the one where he appeared AM: How do you define “fascism”? DPL: If you are sincere in your question, I cannot give you a sound bite (sorry-remember, you asked a professor!): I think the best definition of the kind of fascism we are confronting today is from Shane Burley, author of Fascism Today. He has a concise phrase which captures it well: “Inequality through mythological and essentialized identity.” He goes on to explain: “Standing before the London Forum in 2012, Richard Spencer said that the defining characteristic of the Alt Right was inequality. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created unequal,’ he said, making a clear break with the foundational document of American political independence that the conservative movement clings to as their moral authority. For fascists across the board, the defining factor of their ideology is more than the conservative de-emphasis of equality: inequality, for them, is critical, crucial, and correct. They believe that people are of different abilities and skills, qualities and characteristics, and that those differences should be ranked vertically, not horizontally. How this inequality is interpreted often shifts between different schools of thought and political movements, but they often take antiquated notions about race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, body type, and other qualities to show that groups of people, defined in a myriad of ways, can be ranked as ‘better or worse.’ Even between those groups, such as inside of the ‘white race,’ people are not seen as fundamentally equal. Equality is a social lie that leads to an unhealthy society where the weak rule over the strong through democracy.” I would only add to this elements of what might be called “classical” definitions of fascism, which point to structural phenomena like the convergence of powerful state and business interests that consolidate power away from citizens and into special interests that opportunistically take advantage of “inequality” and argue that the free market is a place for the best to become better, while hiding the structural and historical forces that have kept wealth circulating amongst the very very few. The empirical proof of this is clearly evident in the ways wealth is now concentrated in the hands of the very few. This did not come out of talent or special intelligence, it came from structural phenomena that preserve power and wealth. AM: The “anti-fascist” part of your group’s name is commonly associated with violent protesters who shut down speakers they disagree with. Do you worry about setting
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a bad precedent to students who might interpret your organization as also supporting such violence? DPL: Your statement fuses two things together (when you say “violent protesters”). “Violence” implies physical acts of intimidation, “shut down” in this sense could be construed to be damaging buildings and attacking people physically. That is not what we advocate and we have made that clear. On the other hand, shouting at speakers is part of free speech, just as much as their shouting at protesters is within their rights. AM: You state that you only support self-defense by those threatened by fascism, not outright violence. Could you describe what sort of acts justify this self-defense: do only direct, violent attacks meet this criteria, or anything more? DPL: That is a great question, and gets to an important point. As you know, the vast majority of alt-R work does not take place physically, but rather online. Their online presence sometimes facilitates physical acts, but mostly they are interested in doxxing people, harassing them, intimidating people from speaking out by making examples of those who have. This is done not through simply quoting things people have said, which is fine — it is by creating “fake” news stories that mischaracterize the comment, or cite it so selectively and in such a distorted manner that it does not represent the speaker’s idea. Milo announced that he was going to reveal the names and addresses of undocumented students at Cal. Is this something we want to defend? How would you feel if something you wrote was misquoted and distorted, your family’s home address published online? So I have been urging college administrators to become more informed about how the alt-R can hack into personal and private accounts, create disinformation, draw large crowds with false information. The University of California is already doing this. That is the kind of self-defense that we should all take part in, especially journalists like yourself. Basically, this is a safety issue, not a free speech issue. I have no problem having Richard Spencer speak at Stanford—he can come, and I would help organize and protest. Here is a piece I wrote for Huffington Post, and another good one (not mine) that appeared in Politico: What Campus Administrators Don’t Get About “Free Speech”* and Universities fear a violent 2018* Good luck with your story, and Happy NY, DP-L
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In the original email as well as in the web version of this article, the URLs to these stories are given.
ANTI-ANTI-FASCISM
THE STANFORD REVIEW This is the lead photo the Stanford Review used for its story about Palumbo-Liu titled, “Antifa Thugs Find a Champion and Leader in Stanford Professor.”
In an interview with Stanford Politics, Palumbo-Liu says: “According to the American Association of University Professors, anything that a professor says on social media that is inflammatory or ill-advised is extracurricular speech and should not be included in their academic work. I’ve defended professors before based on first amendment issues although I do not necessarily agree with what some of them have said. That has been the landscape up until the Palumbo-Liu case. This takes it exponentially out of that field of play. I have done nothing. I have said nothing that can be in any way construed as violent or promoting violence. In fact, the evidence points to exactly the opposite.” There have been no complaints filed by any of his students. Furthermore, there are no Stanford students who are members of CAN. Palumbo-Liu’s work at Stanford is well within the boundaries of academic convention as evidenced by the fact that he has been named to multiple high-level committees within Stanford despite the administration’s knowledge of his extra-curricular activity. “Professor Palumbo-Liu’s involvement with a political advocacy organization is his personal choice,” Persis Drell, the Provost of Stanford, tells Stanford Politics. “It is not the business of the University to interfere. Professor Palumbo-Liu has done nothing wrong,” she says. In the time since the article has been published, however, Palumbo-Liu and his family have been the subjects of death threats. Unfortunately, he is not alone. Within the past few years, the number of liberal-minded professors that have been singled out by conservative groups and targeted with death threats has exponentially increased. Most notably, in 2016, Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watch List” was founded with an aim to “list U.S. professors deemed to discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” In an article for The Guardian, Palumbo-Liu likens this to the McCarthyism targeting communists in the mid-20th century. “[Turning Point USA] comes and recruits students to report on their professors,” Palumbo-Liu tells Stanford Politics. “This is a classic case of McCarthyism. It’s character assassination based on
irresponsible pronouncements. We don’t treat people that way. I cannot dredge it out of my own soul to speak about anyone the way that I have been spoken about. This is far different from agitation from the right. This is a well-programmed machine.” In opposition to the harassment that Palumbo-Liu has received, a petition was started in late Jan. by members of the Stanford community to “Stand Against Intimidation of Faculty.” It has garnered over 700 signatures and counting. Provost Drell seems to agree with Palumbo-Liu’s concerns, expressing that “the cases in which members of our community have become subjected to the taunts and hatred of the Internet have been very troubling - no one in our community would desire to inflict that experience on another.” She adds: “I do believe that it is the responsibility of each of us to reject that kind of discourse and the paths that lead to it. It is unfortunate that on social media and in some of our public discourse, facts are distorted and a complete view of a given situation is often hard to discern.” “As an educator, I think this is a good learning experience,” Palumbo-Liu said. “I’m relatively well protected. If this had happened to a junior professor, he/she could not do what I have done. I’m exercising academic freedom, which is a tool not for self-protection but for advancing knowledge. I want this to be a benefit for the Stanford community.” More so than the lack of journalistic standards, Palumbo-Liu is bothered by the bizarre premise of The Review’s article condemning his political advocacy. “The legacy of antifascism goes back to fascism,” Palumbo-Liu says. “It was a resistance to totalitarianism and the idea that one group of people is the definition of one nation and that everyone else is a non or lesser citizen. It’s a strange twist in history that now the term antifascist is a bad term. The heroes we all celebrate on Veteran’s Day were all antifascists. They were fighting for democracy.” Amber Yang, a freshman studying physics, is an associate editor for Stanford Politics.
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DIALOGUE AS ALIBI BEYOND THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS
TRUMAN CHEN & JOSH LAPPEN
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s calls for student dialogue proliferate across American college campuses, the student struggles to be considered an equal in the very discourses they are subjected to. Last year, one quintessential article in the Stanford Review contributed to this paradoxical condition by decrying “millennial” political thought. It continued by claiming that “[t]he political involvement of our generation is becoming increasingly devoid of substance” and that “social justice warriors are the ultimate armchair activists...they engage in the worst forms of political activism.” From these sweeping generalizations, the article then leapt to the conclusion that “[d]ialogue becomes obsolete, preventing us from appreciating the complexity of today’s thorniest issues and from being able to generate solutions to society’s most pressing problems.” This call for an obscurely proposed “dialogue” depends on an unfounded abstraction of students as a whole that allows the author and The Review to establish a rule to which they are the proud exception. This gesture claims rationality, along with a privileged but undefined understanding of what makes “dialogue,” while denying it to the misleading portrait of the student body. In The Review’s case, this distortion of the student body and student thought are generally tools of dishonest provocation, but the Stanford administration and certain faculty inadvertently perpetuate the same misconceived framework from above, as well. This misconstrual forms the basis of our concern with the institutionalization of the call for more open “dialogue” and “free exchange of ideas.” Though superficially innocuous, it in fact reveals an alarming shortcoming in how campus political discourse and its travails are collectively thought and contested. The mobilization of “dialogue” and the invocation of “freedom of speech” by The Review, and more recently Hoover Fellow Niall Ferguson of Cardinal Conversations, mark the administration’s steady surrender to a regressive, false reduction of the complex problems of campus speech to a situation in which the obstacle is merely an intellectually inept and infantilized student body. The tone and presentation of arguments must be taken seriously as indicators of the latent premises which motivate them. We will begin with The Review, where the hidden premise which structures the current debate over student politics takes its most crude, apparent form, before moving on to its institutionalization in Cardinal Conversations and the administration’s statements more broadly.
SIGNS & SYMPTOMS By now, it has all settled into a predictable routine. The Stanford campus gets hit with a manifesto by the likes of the Stanford Review, shaming the rest of us for “acute intellectual decay” while simultaneously posturing as the exclusive custodian of epistemic humility, rationality, and dialogue. This mixture of narcissism and condescension has produced some baffling statements over the years in the time-honored series of “Editor’s Notes” from The Review. For all their complaining that they receive little more than ad hominem attacks that pale in comparison to their purely “rational” speculation, the Notes from this lineage of editors are proof enough of an ideological vindictiveness that habitually discredits its crit-
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ics as thoughtless “activists.” John Luttig, an editor from late 2015, fashioned himself as a brave defender of “rigor” against the bogeyman of “activists,” promising that “[a]s long as radical activism is still alive at Stanford, the Stanford Review, with its commitment to rigorous thinking and its questioning of dogmas, will continue its mission.” Directly preceding him, former editor Brandon Camhi of 2015 subscribed to this very same scapegoating of “activists” incapable of thought and blindly driven by “sympathy,” proclaiming that the “Stanford Review aims to bring these considerations into discourse and highlight the inconsistencies in a worldview grounded solely in sympathy: a perspective that permeates our campus and creates a herd of people in a race to compassion.” Extending this metaphor of the inferior campus herd, 2016 editor Harry Elliott explained his own benevolence: “We will try to keep you from becoming a silent drone, whose dislike of campus politics never makes it past the stage of mere thought. All we ask in return is that you pay attention.” The present moment does not fare much better. The departing editor of The Review, Anna Mitchell, implicitly credits herself, supposedly unlike the rest of us, with having read enough “conflicting ideas of political philosophers” to combat “over-confident generalizations based on our own experiences” — though apparently not the generalizations which The Review engages in with incredible regularity and enthusiasm. With this, she has built on the illustrious legacy of tone-deaf name-calling she inherited. Much more gravely, though, Mitchell has “reported,” cruelly and irresponsibly, that Professor David Palumbo-Liu is somehow a “champion and leader” for “Antifa thugs” and their “vigilante thuggery.” In an act of pure falsehood and opportunism, the hit-piece is so wildly fraudulent that it convicts Palumbo-Liu as a “ring-leader” of “[a] new class of violent thugs [who] prowl our streets…[d]onning black clothes, masks and red bandanas.” When Palumbo-Liu received death threats from The Review’s readers, Mitchell and her Editorial Board shrugged off any responsibility whatsoever, explaining that “we simply cannot control who reads our content... And we cannot set a standard of refusing to publish a piece if it could conceivably result in online harassment.” Though The Review may not control whether its writing is manipulated after the fact, it can control whether that writing is itself manipulative. To feign ignorance as to how their fear-mongering portrait of Palumbo-Liu as a leader of terrorists could possibly have instigated such an attack demonstrates a perverse unwillingness to grasp how rhetorical excess degrades our politics. This reveals the deeper problem with The Review: Its writing reflects — and contributes to — the already-deteriorating standards and rising violence of student discourse. When its ideological myopia lets hatred in through the back door, The Review imperils that discourse’s very legitimacy. Mitchell then laid her piece’s original bad faith bare by participating in its manipulation by the partisan media. Transforming a fabricated campus spat into an interview on Fox News, Mitchell proceeded to use the responses to her own unprovoked hatchet job to misrepresent Stanford in front of a national audience. This egregious behavior exemplifies The Review’s methods of manipulation, by which they convert their own fabricated image of campus
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HANAN YAJOOR / STANFORD POLITICS The Hoover Institution’s Hauck Auditorium during the second — and similarly not-well-attended — Cardinal Conversations event, Feb. 22, 2018.
politics into products for a partisan national audience. There are some exceptions to The Review’s characteristic lack of basic honesty and decency, but they are not the rule. There ought to be a clear distinction between thoughtless provocation and being thought provoking.
A Critique of False Remedies Though less immediately apparent, the same premise which underlies The Review’s damaging ethos has ensnared the university administration. The administration’s outsized and misguided focus on cultivating a simultaneously narrow and vaguely defined “dialogue,” or the more recent “free exchange of ideas,” is a failure of vision and responsibility. President Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Drell have returned over and over again to what by now feels like a well-rehearsed safety measure passed down from administration to administration. Former Provost John Etchemendy’s ominous warning of the “threat from within” has translated into Tessier-Lavigne and Drell’s modest plea: “We are only successful as an intellectual community when our discussion benefits from the entire range of perspective present on our campus.” But the problem in this response is precisely that it blindly seeks to increase the range of student perspectives without first questioning the restricted range of problems and ideas under scrutiny in the first place. On a deeper level, for an administration that seeks purportedly to champion a general sense of academic intelligence regardless of ideological differences, neither the Provost nor the President have anything to say about the sheer lack of political — let alone moral
— content in attacks on faculty who oppose the politics for which The Review stands.
THERE OUGHT TO BE A CLEAR DISTINCTION BETWEEN THOUGHTLESS PROVOCATION AND BEING THOUGHT PROVOKING. The administration’s overriding fear of imposing restrictions on “free expression” leads to equally idealistic and unhelpful promises: “free expression and an inclusive culture are essential parts of the same whole. In a truly inclusive culture, everyone in our diverse community, from all backgrounds and perspectives, has a voice and feels empowered to participate in active debate.” In other words, rather than take seriously the substantive problem of how free expression of certain ideas can oppose the cultivation of an inclusive culture, as has been and will continue to be the case, the administration has chosen instead to bypass the issue, instead offering resources to those who are “deeply wounded or even frightened” by free-wheeling exchange within the so-called marketplace of ideas. The administration’s acknowledgement of the harmful consequences of granting someone as vile as Robert Spencer a platform in a university like Stanford is valuable, but minimalist damage control is an inadequate solution.
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DIALOGUE The administration’s legalistic adherence to a market conception of intellectual exchange encourages reckless and extreme voices while undervaluing the many healthy, unsanctioned forums of campus political conversations which do exist at Stanford. No one disagrees when the President and Provost insist that “[d]isagreement should not threaten an academic community, it should enhance it” — but the superficial neutrality of their actions have thus far confirmed this ideal as a mere truism. We all hope to foster productive disagreement; but how ideas circulate is as important to this project as what those ideas are. Those who seek to misappropriate Stanford’s academic credentials for partisan purposes, whether they be off-campus pseudo-scholars like Spencer or members of the Stanford community such as the editors of The Review, consciously manipulate the administration’s unwillingness to think systemically about the implications and consequences of employing free-market metaphors to referee political exchange. Professor Palumbo-Liu describes the pseudo-intellectual debate this encourages as: “not subtle, nuanced, open to adjustment, correction, engagement — it is brittle, bombastic, demagogic. It speaks in absolutes and tricks one into thinking that the only way to win the argument is to be equally crude, simplistic and dogmatic. This is a pernicious cycle that is costly to universities in material and spiritual ways.” Nevertheless, this has paved the way for the launch of Cardinal Conversations, a well-funded, “bipartisan” project christened by the President and Provost to “address some of society’s most complex issues and expose the campus to a wide range of perspectives and views.” Its goals are indistinguishable from a proliferating set of groups, publications, and initiatives, such as the recently-founded Stanford Sphere that promises to “cut across the groupthink lines of consensus to challenge prevailing attitudes and we will refuse to be trapped by the claustrophobia of modern identity politics.” Despite the bold promises, though, its speakers’ views have thus far comprised not a wide range of perspectives, but rather a limited and predictable set of planks. Most recently, the administration has engendered frustration by inviting Charles Murray, known as a racist and social scientist. The administration’s failures of imagination when selecting speakers to create “a culture of open exchange” have been well-discussed. More fundamentally, though, the topics of debate which Cardinal Conversations has selected reinforce the creeping suspicion that this model of “respectful expression” is more about the staging of ideas rather than the ideas themselves. For issues that deserve such patient and thorough engagement with the founding assumptions of American intellectual and political history, a strange air of performance and hastiness hangs over Cardinal Conversations. The distracting performativity of Cardinal Conversations is not helped by the show’s host and architect, Hoover Institution historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson’s public statements cast universities like Stanford as hopeless academic wastelands populated by emotionally fragile and intellectually impotent leftists sorely in need of enlightened role models — role models, conveniently, much like Ferguson himself. The students who disrupted a Charles Murray event at Middlebury College were indicted by Ferguson in the New York Times as “contemptible ‘stu-
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dents’”— scare-quotes and all. Ferguson then goes on to bet that “not one of [the students] had ever read a word of [Murray’s],” insinuating simultaneously that student protesters are blindly uninformed and that any criticism of Murray’s intellectual credibility or relevance could only be derived from ignorance. Ferguson’s open contempt is as unprofessional as it is corrosive to the very premise of the President and Provost’s vision for Cardinal Conversations, which they hope “might model the respectful disagreement that is important in a university community.” Standards run both ways.
THE ADMINISTRATION’S OUTSIZED AND MISGUIDED FOCUS ON CULTIVATING A SIMULTANEOUSLY NARROW AND VAGUELY DEFINED “DIALOGUE,” OR THE MORE RECENT “FREE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS,” IS A FAILURE OF VISION AND RESPONSIBILITY. Outside of Cardinal Conversations, Tessier-Lavigne and Drell have sought in their “Notes from the Quad” series to cultivate “[a] sense of mutual respect” by modelling it, such that “[w]e can bring empathy and deep listening to our interactions out of a desire to learn more from one another.” Keeping this squarely in mind: Ferguson has recently pontificated in a Reddit AMA that he is “depressed by the lunacy of intersectionality and intolerance on campuses, which is now seeping into the workplace. The only consolation is that the Western civilization has come through rougher patches than this.” That Tessier-Lavigne and Drell chose Ferguson — who appears to think that ridiculing students as lunatics is pedagogically sound and appropriate — to spearhead their most high-profile attempt to realize their values of “respectful disagreement” is a point of confounding contradiction. Ferguson has chalked up the low turnout for Cardinal Conversations’ latest debate to the ungratefulness or simple inferiority of Stanford students. With incredible pettiness, Ferguson even used it as a marker to deprecate Stanford undergraduates compared to “Oxford and Harvard” students, as if the attendance for this event were some positive standard of intelligence and political engagement. Nevertheless, even if Ferguson were right about the special challenge of reforming Stanford students — and it would be shockingly reductive to support him here — then we should expect to see him, Cardinal Conversations, and the ever-concerned administration thinking long and hard about the educational tools at their disposal. For example, we need more substantive support for the arts and humanities; more invitations for underrepresented thinkers and artists from around the world who receive critical ac-
DIALOGUE claim but struggle to reach American audiences; more thoughtful interventions in campus culture; and a less reflexive bureaucratic resistance to student expression in all its forms. That we clearly do not see such changes is telling. These demands are nothing new, yet the administration seems intent on neglecting them in favor of funding distracting diversions like Cardinal Conversations. Just recently, former UN ambassador Samantha Power’s Tanner Lectures were well-attended and received with acclaim, and essayist Louis Menand’s conversation on the demands of humanistic public writing spoke directly to the issues that Cardinal Conversations claims to address. So rather than support Ferguson’s sulking complaint that the student body has failed to appreciate the value of his speaker series, we need to acknowledge that this speaker series is more of the same, rebranded but transparently familiar, and neither special nor especially enlightening. For all of Ferguson and The Review’s tired veneration of the Western tradition, there is still a gaping absence of any trace of that Socratic resistance to blinding self-assuredness, and what Hannah Arendt upheld as that internal doubling of the self that allows for the “soundless dialogue” characteristic of “thinking experience.” Even Professor Michael McFaul, the faculty advisor seemingly conscripted to present Cardinal Conversations as more bipartisan, could hardly feign enthusiasm over Murray’s visit. McFaul’s subdued regret over Murray’s invitation feels both empty and familiar — the strongest argument it can muster is that sitting through an evening of Charles Murray builds character. What is more illumi-
nating, however, is his “begrudging” positive defense of the event that misses a fundamental point: “I invited to Stanford Russian ambassador Anatoly Antonov, even though I am one of America’s strongest critics of Russian President Putin and his policies...Yet, I brought Antonov to campus as a means to educate our students and myself about Putin’s policies...I do not think that I accorded legitimacy to Putin by having his representative speak on campus. I see Murray’s visit today the same way.” McFaul’s equivalence ignores a crucial difference between the two cases at hand: Antonov was not invited as an emissary of Cardinal Conversations, a platform for “models” of intellect and that “culture of open exchange.” Rather, he was invited in his official capacity as a representative of the Russian government. The elision of this vital distinction invalidates McFaul’s sweeping claim about the nature of institutional legitimization. We have seen the fight which Murray’s inclusion engendered happen repeatedly on campus, and every stage of the process felt completely predictable — prescribed moves in a sort of ritualized political combat. It is easy to declare in response that the participants are at fault — that Murray seeks to provoke controversy and acts the academic only in bad faith, or that students have forgotten the art of discourse and the value of respect. Both feel immaterial, no matter how endlessly the recriminations churn. What remains absent is the realization that all these responses and counter-responses — the whole dull and vicious performance — are made almost necessary by the administration’s evasive attitude towards political discussion.
AARON KEHOE / STANFORD NEWS Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell speak about free speech and campus discourse, among other issues, at a community town hall, Oct. 04, 2017.
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THE CULT OF THE CONTRARIAN It is depressing to think that the administration would choose to re-enact these political brawls as a means of elevating the level of campus discourse. To the contrary, the only reason to reconstruct on campus the same derivative performances which happen every day in the national media is for the performative value. If the administration and its chosen political programs seem time and time again to constrain the realm of “campus political dialogue” to precisely those topics which are least productive to discuss, it is because the administration is caught up too deeply in the fixation on bipartisanship. Cardinal Conversations, like so many of the administration’s efforts, has conflated thoughtful disagreement with the oppositions of doctrinaire liberal-conservative disputes on a limited set of topics. These stilted debates provide the administration with a ready-made tool for signaling concern about the state of campus discourse, while simultaneously avoiding the public-relations risk of appearing to tip the partisan political scales. The galling irony of this risk-management approach is that it not only ignores but actually actively undermines the creation of stronger, more meaningful political discussion. As an institution, Stanford has learned to legalize its problems, deferring responsibility for hard decisions by casting the state as the unaccountable external arbiter of university policy and campus intellectual life. On the topic of campus political discourse, this abdication manifests itself in the administration’s perpetual return to the First Amendment as a transplanted standard for academic speech. More broadly, the First Amendment has become the
pivot around which every argument about political conversation on campus turns. Whenever challenged, The Review and its conservative companions rush to cast themselves as victims of some encroachment upon the First Amendment; the scrum that results produces a variety of indefensible or uncontroversial positions on whether freedom of speech is really worth it. This endless cycle of hand-wringing over censorship reliably produces mind-numbing truisms: The President and Provost have most recently reassured us that they “firmly support the rights of all members of the university community to protest peacefully against opinions with which they disagree.” Even if the administration were reliably dedicated to those values, their treatment of Cardinal Conversations and their non-response response to The Review’s assault on Professor Palumbo-Liu reveal a troubling gulf between principles and actions.
THE GALLING IRONY OF THIS RISK-MANAGEMENT APPROACH IS THAT IT NOT ONLY IGNORES BUT ACTUALLY ACTIVELY UNDERMINES THE CREATION OF STRONGER, MORE MEANINGFUL POLITICAL DISCUSSION.
HANAN YAJOOR / STANFORD POLITICS Cardinal Conversations organizer and conservative historian Niall Ferguson (center) moderates a discussion between Charles Murray (right) and Francis Fukuyama (left) on populism and inequality in America.
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DIALOGUE The First Amendment is absolutely necessary as a foundation and an inviolable perimeter in American society; some version of it is likewise necessary in the university. But it is deeply insufficient for the production of healthy, or even decent and worthwhile, political conversation. Freedom of speech is indeed a protector of the possibility of thoughtful conversation, but it is not its guarantor. The latter, more sweeping conception of the First Amendment supports the specious notion of a marketplace of ideas, in which the discerning public sorts faulty and misleading notions from the sound ones. This marketplace model is familiar, appealing, and seriously flawed. In real-world exchange, ideas are not equally powerful, rhetoric is not always transparent, and the discerning public’s access to facts and context is deeply uneven. Under these circumstances, relying on the intellectual equivalent of the invisible hand to preserve sound ideas and deflate flawed ones becomes either bafflingly naive or criminally negligent. In the marketplace of ideas, special value accrues to the daring “contrarian” and the plucky devil’s advocate, who voice the ideas that other voices are assumed to be too timid or too conventional to suggest. Most familiarly in campus conversation, this has been The Review’s consistent understanding of its own contribution. One of The Review’s 2017 editors, Philip Clark, wrote in his Editor’s Note that The Review would “inject campus with a much needed dose of heterodoxy” to combat a broader “retreat from the free exchange of ideas.” The Review’s valorous self-conception as the intellectual maverick in a slavishly conformist campus culture is specious not only because it is wrong — The Review’s preferred topics and angles are almost unfathomably predictable and familiar — but also because it rests on the flawed notion that unpopular ideas are valuable because they are unpopular. In the end, what makes Clark’s promise notable is precisely that it is not heterodox. It offers a commonplace diagnosis of student incompetence, one that conveniently justifies The Review’s cynical trolling, but which the administration increasingly shares. At a time when Stanford’s leaders claim to be so deeply concerned about the quality of campus discourse, they have not only remained absolutely silent on The Review’s most despicable acts of character assassination, but are in fact treating The Review as a partner with Cardinal Conversations. Rather than being merely embarrassing, the administration’s decisions here are an indication that something is more deeply wrong with their understanding of the situation. Provost Drell wrote a month ago that “just because a form of expression is constitutionally guaranteed does not mean it is ethical or appropriate.” We should expect to see the administration assume its responsibility by acting on this vital distinction. This would require confronting violations of moral and intellectual integrity, and crafting contributions of their own that are thought-provoking and worth disagreeing with, rather than simple risk-averse responses designed to avoid engendering critique and debate. The prefiguration of discourse as a marketplace of ideas fails when it reduces the act of thinking to the promotion of predetermined conclusions, ideas, and perspectives. Genuine political discourse is a process of contemplation, discussion, and refinement
— it is thought as exercise rather than aptitude. Fostering this activity on a university campus is not a process of demonstrating to students what to think, but rather exploring how to think with lucidity and care in the first place. This formulation should be familiar to the President and Provost — it is this approach to thought as activity rather than outcome, as practice rather than product, that our liberal educations are supposedly aimed at cultivating. Stanford’s leaders seem troublingly disinterested in applying the powerful principles which govern academic life (and which adorn Stanford’s admissions pamphlets) to the genuinely tricky challenges of supporting a political culture on campus which is multipolar, genuine, and robust.
GENUINE POLITICAL DISCOURSE IS A PROCESS OF CONTEMPLATION, DISCUSSION, AND REFINEMENT — IT IS THOUGHT AS EXERCISE RATHER THAN APTITUDE. Cardinal Conversations and programs like it are contributing to the problem they nominally hope to fix. The performativity of dialogue has its place, but because it addresses its audience as partisans rather than as equal interlocutors, it does not forward the administration’s goals. Likewise, by treating the First Amendment as a standard rather than as a minimalist limit, the administration contributes to the commodification of thought and insults the depth and complexity of political thinking. These are strange contradictions from an administration which has at least been unambiguous in its vague “commitment to advancing both intellectual debate and a truly inclusive campus culture.” In reality, beneath the posturing which groups like The Review offer to off-campus audiences, political discourse is alive on this campus, in humanities classrooms, in many of the activist communities which The Review so loathes, and in the everyday interactions which make up campus life. The administration has identified serious problems and significant opportunities, but the actions it has taken are simultaneously timid and imperious. This approach is dismissive of the positive work which happens everyday outside the confines of officially-sanctioned dialogue, and reveals a mindset that remains disappointingly uncritical. It is up to us to dispute these stultifying strictures on student potential. Discourse which belittles its intended audience, trades in distortions, or merely echoes partisan — or bipartisan — platitudes should expect to be challenged within the university. The student body can and must reclaim the discourse proper to the university: one anchored in historical discernment and ethical responsibility.
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“Obama thought about American leadership in a much more comprehensive way” A conversation with incoming FSI Fellow and former Obama ADMINISTRATION National Security official Colin Kahl JAKE DOW Dr. Colin Kahl recently came to Stanford as the inaugural Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow, an endowed faculty chair at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Previously, Dr. Kahl served as National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden and a deputy assistant to the President. Kahl also served in the Obama administration as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East at the Pentagon, responsible for advising the Secretary on Middle East policy. On Feb. 5th, Stanford Politics managing editor Jake Dow sat down with Dr. Kahl to discuss his views on President Trump’s foreign policy, the situation on the Korean peninsula, and perspectives on the legacy of President Obama’s foreign policy. The following is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length.
It’s been reported that former Bush official Victor Cha, the prospective Ambassador to South Korea, was dropped because he wouldn’t support a “bloody nose” strike on North Korea. How concerned are you by these developments, do you think that the Trump administration is seriously considering a first strike? I’m very concerned about the North Korea situation in general. I do think that there are elements within the Trump administration that may be attracted to the notion of some type of preventive military strike. There is reporting, and I have separate information as well, that suggests that the NSC staff did task the Pentagon to provide a range of military options to include limited strikes, and while I’m not privy to the exact contingency planning, may be considering a limited strike against a missile in preparation for launch, or a less limited but not all out strike that goes after subset of North Korea’s missile infrastructure. I do not think that the majority of of folks in the Trump administration support this. I see no indication that Secretary Mattis or Chairman Dunford supports it or that Secretary of State Tillerson supports it. I would say that the thing that concerns me the most is that some of the most prominent folks in the Trump administration, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and the CIA Director Pompeo, have made arguments which seem to justify the logic of a preventive military strike to prevent North Korea from crossing certain red lines.
COLIN KAHL Regarding the concept of a limited strike on North Korea, how do you explain this view that North Korea is rational enough to not escalate after a limited strike, but they are too irrational to be dealt with through deterrence? I don’t think there’s actually a good answer to that. What concerned me about things that McMaster and Pompeo said is that they essentially made the argument that Kim Jong Un is a fundamentally irrational actor. He’s a brutal dictator who’s massacred large numbers of his people and he wouldn’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons. Similar arguments were made against Saddam Hussein. They’ve also made the argument that North Korea might sell their weapons or the technology, and as a consequence, there is no situation where the United States can live with or default back to a deterrence posture towards North Korea like we had towards the Soviet Union or Communist China during the Cold War. I think the problem with that argument is that most North Korea analysts believe Kim Jong Un is fundamentally rational. It doesn’t mean he’s not brutal. Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin were brutal too, and they were deterrable. The prime objective that Kim Jong Un has is regime survival and to keep his family in power in North Korea. All of that would be put at risk to use nuclear weapons against the United States or one of our treaty allies. But if you’re convinced that he’s not rational and not deterrable then a preventive military strike suddenly starts to look like the lesser of two evils, that if we’re going to have a war it’s better to have the war now before he has the ability to reach the continental United States. People might ask if Kim is rational and can deterred outside of a crisis, why couldn’t he be deterred inside a crisis? The concern there is if you believe the Kim Jong Un is rational and values regime survival over all else, that’s consistent with him escalating in the face of a limited strike because he’ll have no confidence that it is only a limited war. He may also feel that failure to retaliate in kind would put his regime in danger domestically. It’s consistent to make the argument that he’s rational enough to be deterred from using nuclear weapons but would still retaliate against limited limited strike.
THIRD WAY THINK TANK
Colin Kahl at the Inside Politics National Security and The Presidency Breakfast, Sept. 25, 2012.
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COLIN KAHL
There’s a variety of Congressional efforts to limit in some way the President’s ability to launch a first strike against North Korea. What do you think the proper role is of Congress in overseeing or asserting authority in this issue? How do you balance the President’s Commander in Chief authority with the genuine worries of massive conflict? On one hand Presidents of the United States should have a lot of discretion to be able to use force in extreme circumstances to respond to threats to the national interest. On the other hand, we do live in a democracy and you know it’s important that when we launch wars, especially ones that could have severe consequences, that it’s done with the informed consent of the American people. Even a war that was limited to the Korean Peninsula could put at risk tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of American lives. If we’re talking about a preventive war, it’s my firm belief that the President of the United States should be required to seek the informed consent of the American public through the Congress, getting an Authorization of the Use of Military Force. I think the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was probably the greatest foreign policy blunder of my lifetime, but the Bush administration at least understood that they needed to have the informed consent of Congress if they were going to launch a preventive war. And I think that there’s no indication that the Trump administration feels similarly. So I’m sympathetic to the desire of Congress to impose that requirement on the president.
Moving to Iran, we’ve recently seen big waves of protests in a way that we haven’t since Green Revolution, but manifesting in a different way. How do you assess the genesis of this movement? Where is this political emotion coming from that from the American perspective seemed to come of out of the blue? It was a surprise to everybody, including folks who focus on the country much more intensely than I do. I don’t know that anybody in our intelligence community anticipated it either. The big difference between the protests over the last couple several weeks and during the fraudulent elections in 2009 is that in 2009, the trigger for the protests was the perception that the regime had rigged the election to make sure that Ahmadinejad came back in power, and that his reformist opponent was defeated. It was a protest that was largely oriented around a political movement that was already existing in the lead up to the elections. It was very urban centric, very Tehran centric, much more elitist. There’s a sense that these protests are different, that they are for the most part not happening in Tehran, they’re happening in smaller towns and cities and in rural areas throughout Iran and are being driven by average Iranians who are fed up with their system. In some ways analysts see this as an indication that these protests are actually a graver threat to the regime because they are emanating in places that the regime takes for granted. There’s a lot of pent up frustration in the system. All of that said, at least for the moment, the protests appear to have kind of gone down somewhat, which suggests to me that there may be a latent possibility for a resurgence of this. There were a lot of people a couple weeks ago who thought that we were in a revolutionary moment in Iran, but I think that was a bunch of Western analysts who were understandably enthusiastic for this regime entering the dustbin of history, but that seems to have been a little premature.
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COLIN KAHL In Obama administration’s policy towards Iran, there was a conscious effort to not link the nuclear issue to the other issues, whether regional activity, domestic politics, etc. Critics of Obama and the JCPOA or “Iran Deal” say this was the wrong decision, pointing to protesters and accelerating regional assertiveness. How do you reassess the non linkage policy in hindsight? It’s a little bit of revisionist history because if you actually go back and look at the debates during the beginning of the Obama administration in 2009 through 2015, when the nuclear deal was struck, you will find that every Iran analyst was making the argument that whatever threat Iran posed in a general sense, no aspect of the threat was more problematic for the United States and our allies than the nuclear issue. The notion that Obama kind of foolishly prioritized the nuclear issue to the detriment of everything else strikes me as crazy because as the official in charge of the Iran portfolio and many other countries in the Middle East at the beginning of the the Obama administration, most of my time was spent thinking about what happens if we go to war with Iran because of their nuclear program. Either because we would launch a war to stop them from crossing the nuclear finish line or the Israelis would launch a war and drag us in. The prospect of Iran becoming a nuclear armed state, the equivalent of North Korea on the Strait of Hormuz, or a major war launched by US or the Israelis to forestall that outcome, was an enormous preoccupation. The second thing is it is true that there were that there were people who believed that only way to solve the nuclear issue was to pursue a policy of regime change. While people weren’t really signing up for a massive military invasion of Iran, a country the size of Iraq and Afghanistan put together in terms of population, there was hope that some combination of military threats and crippling economic sanctions could in essence bankrupt the regime into collapse. Our analysts in the entire period that I was there in the Obama administration never thought that the regime was on the brink of economic collapse, even just before the Iran nuclear deal struck. One interesting data point for people to keep in mind is at the point that the Iran nuclear deal was struck, the sanctions that we imposed on Iran had done something like 200 billion dollars of damage to the Iranian economy. But this same regime suffered 600 billion dollars of damage and nearly a million casualties during the Iran-Iraq war and it still took him eight years to settle for a tie. This was not a regime that was teetering on the brink of collapse. And the problem with the regime change folks was that if you made regime change your policy, you were likely to increase the motivation of the regime to pursue nuclear weapons. The last point that people make is that we should have insisted that with the nuclear deal we wouldn’t lift the accompanying sanctions unless Iran stopped all its support for terrorism, regional militancy, its ballistic missile program and everything else. There is just no evidence that Iran was willing to do that. And I think one concern was that there wasn’t any international support for making for conditioning a lifting of nuclear sanctions on non nuclear activities. Unless we had international support we couldn’t keep the sanctions regime in place. There was also a concern by the international community and our negotiators that if you tried to fold all of Iran’s regional behavior into the negotiations it would actually transfer leverage to Iran.
Specifically in the national security space, what’s something that you don’t think the Obama administration gets enough credit for and then what’s one regret, something that you wish had gone differently? The Obama’s administration doesn’t get enough credit for is restoring a much more balanced approach to U.S. leadership. There’s a tendency in Washington especially to define American engagement in leadership is very militaristic terms, that is we’re only leading if we’re bombing a place and also to say that if we’re not overinvested in the Middle East, that we’ve somehow retreated from the rest of the world. What Obama understood is that we’re actually much more effective as a leader if we are tending to our economy at home, our alliances abroad, the overall architecture of the liberal international order, existing international institutions, building new agreements and thinking of engagement as leading with diplomacy and not just the use or not principally the use of force. If you actually look at the Obama administration’s achievements in that light it makes a lot more sense:the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Iran nuclear deal which addressed the the most
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COLIN KAHL proximate threat to the nonproliferation regime, the normalization of relations with Cuba which opened up a new chapter in our relations with the Western Hemisphere, the Trans Pacific Partnership, which was the biggest trade accord in a generation stitching together the economies of 12 different countries making up 40 percent global GDP and a very high standards agreement that would have given the United States much more skin in the game in Asia to compete with China in all sorts of ways. Obama thought about American leadership in a much more comprehensive way that wasn’t just about using using military force and it wasn’t just about the Middle East. A lot of the anxiety that people have currently about President Trump is precisely that he’s overcorrected to the other direction, the only form of American leadership he appears to be comfortable with is the military instrument. He doesn’t care at all about diplomacy, certainly not resourcing or staffing the State Department for that purpose, and they don’t have strategies for any of the problems that we’re talking about, North Korea or Iran, conflicts in Yemen, Syria and how to deal with Russia and China. I think where in retrospect the Obama administration may have seen as being less successful is in the great power competition category. From the end of the Cold War through the Obama years, there was a hope in the convergence hypothesis, we’d moved past the point of great power competition, that other countries were either too weak or had so many common interests with the United States and the overall liberal international order that we had constructed that there would be more of a convergence between US and would-be great powers. I think for the most part that is true among the advanced industrial democracies: the United States, the countries of Europe, the democratic actors in Asia. But it has proved not to be true with China and Russia. While engagement by the Obama administration of both Russia, in the form of the Reset at the beginning and China throughout, paid huge dividends, because we prioritized engagement over competition with the Russians and the Chinese, they probably crept closer to a sphere of influence in their regions then we should be comfortable with. I think the notion that there’s been a return of great power politics, that we have to take it seriously and that we need to think of it in terms of a competitive frame is probably right. Jake Dow, a junior studying political science, is the managing editor of Stanford Politics.
President Barack Obama talks with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry, and National Security Advisors (to the Vice President and President, respectively) Colin Kahl and Susan Rice outside the West Wing of the White House, July 15, 2015.
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SILICON VALLEY’S MEDIA DESERT EMILY LEMMERMAN
T
he issues facing San Francisco Bay news organizations are the same ones facing newspapers nationwide — decreased circulation and lowered advertising revenues, leading to downsizing. But the Bay Area isn’t just any other metropolitan area — the nine counties that make it up generated $781 billion in gross domestic product in 2016. That makes the Bay Area the 18th largest economy in the world. And while the Silicon Valley economy has continued to grow — around 6 percent in 2017 — its news organizations have gotten smaller. The Pulitzer-winning San Jose Mercury News went from a 400-person newsroom in the 1990s to having less than 50 reporters in 2018. And Bay Area News Group, the largest publisher of daily and weekly newspapers in the Bay Area, no longer has reporters covering higher education, K-12 education, Santa Clara county government, or health. Local media must shift to a nonprofit or not-purely-profit-maximizing model to thrive. While the Bay Area has the resources — specifically, a concentration of wealth that would allow for nonprofit investment in local media — this kind of investment hasn’t happened. Instead, private equity and investment firms have scooped struggling media outlets up, slashing funding in order to maximize profit margins. This has led to diminishing local coverage, despite a booming economy. According to Stanford media economist Jay Hamilton, it’s puzzling why there isn’t more investment in media in the Bay Area. “Why hasn’t there been good nonprofit media about our local area, given our density of billionaires?” he asks, pointing to publications like the Texas Tribune in Austin, Texas — local investigative journalism funded by wealthy donors. “We don’t really have a Texas Tribune of Silicon Valley, and we could, given the number of people.” CALmatters, based out of Sacramento, is a new nonprofit website focused on state-level journalism, but it’s only a start in what could, and ought to, be the development rather than contraction of
a strong Bay Area and California local media environment. There are good examples of newspapers changing hands from private equity to personal nonprofit ownership. Glen Taylor, owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves, purchased the Minneapolis Star-Tribune from the investment firm Avista Capital Partners in 2014. Unlike private equity firms, Taylor restructured the paper to be sustainable but without slashing costs and reducing the quality of content in order to ensure large profit margins. Hamilton describes both purchases like this one and newspapers of yesteryear — owned personally by families — as having a “psychic income,” adding to the reputation of a family or operating as a public good rather than solely being profitable. Jeff Bezos’s acquisition of the Washington Post could be framed similarly — he has helped The Post succeed, without focusing first on slashing costs. Silicon Valley purports to be a place focused on social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility. If local media’s role as a public good or social service, rather than as another private, profit-based industry is to be emphasized, it seems feasible that another Bezos or Taylor -style purchase of a local media outlet would be possible. Local media’s role in encouraging civic engagement, local democracy, and acting as a whistleblower for local government agencies and nonprofits is well-documented. Investing in or donating to a local paper should be seen in the same light as donating to a foundation — the preservation of a local public good, but one that must crucially be maintained separately from government. Specifically in the Bay Area, private equity buyouts are a major culprit of decreased funding for media and decreased coverage of local issues. Lower revenues, due to decreased circulation and moves toward online advertising, have led to the kind of financial “distress” that attracts private equity firms and hedge funds. These firms then cut spending, which means, in many cases, laying writers off. Alden Global Capital, under the aegis of a conglomerate
called Digital First Media, bought and shuttered the Alameda TimesStar, the Fremont Argus, and the Hayward Daily Review. In 2016, it closed the 142-year-old Oakland Tribune. The Tribune and former Contra Costa Times were collapsed into sections in a new publication, the East Bay Times. Digital First Media has also aggressively acquired and contracted newspapers elsewhere — including the Boston Herald, Denver Post, and Orange County Register, among many other newspapers around the country. While the problem of private equity and investment firms preying on “distressed” local news outlets is happening nationwide, the Bay Area has the resources to fight back against the contraction of local news media but hasn’t. It may seem that the Bay Area would be immune to lower revenues and consumption of local news because of its concentration of wealthy, college-educated people. However, both wealth and education may be irrelevant to local media consumption. As the New York Times and Washington Post continue to grow their readership among coastal, college-educated people, the local news outlets these same readers used to support have come into financial difficulty. More than ever, the New York Times has begun to try to cater to its California audiences — in June 2016, it began a daily column, California Today, that aggregates California-specific news. The publication has also increased its targeted coverage of the state, including the Bay Area. However, increased coverage of state-level issues by national papers like the New York Times doesn’t fill the same void that local papers like the Oakland Tribune and Fremont Argus once did — hyper-local investigative journalism that covers city councils, local schools, and public services often requires reporters and resources on scene. In part, Hamilton says, The Times may reign king over local papers in the Bay Area because of a lack of “identity consumption.” Hamilton argues that people are motivated to consume news media as part of their political identity — they consume media as a Sanders, Obama, or Trump supporter, but not as a resident of San Jose or Santa Clara County. His theory about the decline of local media consumption is drawn in part from the theory of rational ignorance, coined by Stanford economics graduate student Anthony Downs in the 1950s. Rational ignorance is the idea that, when economically assessed, there are no rational benefits of being politically informed as a voter. Identity consumption based on one’s allegiance to county or city is a hard sell in a place like Silicon Valley, which is “more about business than a place you call home” as Hamilton puts it. Instead, Bay Area readers want to read about national
issues, and usually along partisan lines. Despite the seeming lack of personal motivation to consume local media, there is a quantifiable price to the lowered consumption and production of local media. Not only does local news play the role of watchdog for school boards, local politicians, and businesses, but local news has been proven to increase political engagement. A 2002 paper from researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Pennsylvania entitled “Does the NYT spread ignorance and apathy?” shows a correlation between the delivery of the New York Times to an area, a subsequent drop in local media subscriptions, and the phenomena of “college-educated individuals targeted by the Times becom[ing] less likely to vote in local elections.” And a 2011 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that when the Cincinnati Post closed in 2007, civic engagement in municipal elections decreased in areas served by the newspaper — fewer people ran, less people voted, and campaign spending fell. The same effect has been observed all over the country — but particularly in Seattle and Denver, where civic engagement by many measures dropped significantly when local newspapers shut down. Lack of funding is motivating the shutdown of newspapers, but donation or nonprofit based models for media are working. At the Texas Tribune, a mix of individual and foundation donors contributed over $6 million in 2016, allowing the newsroom to operate outside of purely profit-based concerns. In this light, there’s no good reason why Silicon Valley doesn’t have a thriving media environment. Nonprofit, donation-based media seems both feasible and ideal for the preservation of local media. Barring that, while potentially counterintuitive, a tech billionaire buyout of a local paper, with the intention of nurturing local investigative journalism and local reporting rather than slashing costs, may actually foster more local political engagement. Facebook, a new media behemoth itself, claims to be supporting local news media through prioritizing those stories on its News Feed — but without reporters to cover the full gamut of local news, and without local news to highlight, this initiative does little. Without funding local media itself, civic engagement and accountability from local organizations and government cannot be maintained, let alone increased. Emily Lemmerman, a junior studying sociology, is a senior staff writer for Stanford Politics. Roxy Bonafont contributed research and reporting.
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