Editorials

The pages of the Daily Planet have been full of controversies about what constitutes appropriate speech in the past month or so. To partisans in the various discussions, their own case probably seems unique, but there are common threads which unite them.  

We’ve printed some, though not all, of the letters about who shouted what at the Daniel Pipes lecture on the UC campus. We’ve acknowledged that we made a mistake printing a letter reporting that an attendee said something specific which he denies. But the value of the brouhaha, as far as I’m concerned, is that I didn’t know much about Pipes before this happened, and now I do. I looked at his website, and can now report that I find his views reprehensible. Do I condemn the organization that sponsored his visit? No, because the more the public knows about people like this, the better. Do I condemn the people who created a scene during the talk? I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if they prevented the audience from hearing or not. Pipes has the right to speak, and the audience has the right to listen. But I commend the protesters, photographed for the Planet, who stood outside with signs indicating their disapproval. 

A journalism student in this issue criticizes the Planet’s use of a graphic black and white photo of an accident scene on an inside page. I approved the use of the photo myself, and the reason I did so is because it so clearly shows the disparity in size between the go-cart and the truck which literally ran over it. The editor for that issue and I, both parents and grandparents, hoped it might serve as a warning that it is never safe to operate these little motorized vehicles in the street. Showing the victim’s blood spilling out beneath the truck was unavoidable, but not the central focus of the picture. 

The death of one person, old or young, is “an inconceivable horror.” Many 15-year-olds cannot “imagine or believe” in their own mortality. It does no one, including family, friends and especially other kids who are tempted to live dangerously, any service to cover up the reality and finality of death in order to save their sensibilities.  

Bowdlerizing will never be Daily Planet policy. When a speaker uses “dirty” language in everyday speech, that tells the reader something about who the speaker is and what his values are. When a young man who has spent time in juvenile hall says “the police always fucked with him” he's using strong language to express strong anger, and his choice of language tells the reader something about who he hangs out with.  

If the letter writer is a journalism student, chances are she’s somewhat younger than my 64 years. I was educated in a convent school, but it doesn't shock me to see the word “fuck” in print. Journalists have been accurately quoting strong language for at least 40 years in my experience, and civilization still survives.  

Then there’s the request of a school board member that the Planet print more good news about the schools. I’ve already written one editorial about that topic, reprising the bad witch Evilene from “The Wiz” saying “don’t nobody never bring me no bad news!” but perhaps Mr. Doran didn’t read it. (I know he saw the show when they did it at Berkeley High). I’ve supported the Berkeley public schools for 30 years, but there’s just no point in pretending that things are better than they really are. Doran’s suggestion that our reporter should have focused on a future program involving a celebrity chef instead of current problems with food service reminded me of the old song Woody Guthrie used sing: “There’ll be pie in the sky by and by.” Even if, by and by, there will be quiche in the schools, children are already eating school lunches every day, and they need good food now. 

Next, we’ve seen recent attempts to make sure that major projects downtown will be done deals before the public knows what’s happening. The Seagate behemoth and the UC hotel megaplex might or might not be good ideas, but the powers that be, whoever they are, seem determined to turn one or the other into a new Gaia-type scandal by doing everything behind closed doors. That’s how mistakes happen. 

And finally, we have the continuing effort of whoever is running the show in the city administration to shut off the flow of information from the citizenry to the electeds. The erstwhile “rules” committee, now re-baptized the “agenda” committee, was set up by the new mayor to limit what the City Council gets to consider. True, the original version was loosened up after many complaints, but new proposals pop up regularly to further encroach on public access to elected officials. Two of the latest bad ideas: truncating the commission system, which provides many person-years of unpaid citizen labor to solve all sorts of problems at no cost to the city, and moving public comments at council meetings even more in the direction of soundbytes by cutting them to two minutes per person.  

(Well, at least the current system draws speakers’ cards at random from a basket. When I first moved to Berkeley, the mayor held the cards, and shuffled them at will to select favored speakers.) 

One more chorus from the choir: Free public speech, and lots of it, is the best way in a democracy to be sure that the right things happen. Berkeley owes a lot to the civic watchdogs whose howls of outrage regularly appear in these pages.  

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Daily Planet.›