What should a newsroom do with neo-Nazis and other haters?
That’s a conversation we had in the newsroom this week as another protest loomed at a drag queen story hour, this one in Cleveland. The haters were talking online about protesting, using awful language and slurs to rally support for their cause. I’m not repeating their hate here, but one of the more mild phrases: “With Leftists trying everything to take over Ohio, we have no choice by to struggle harder to preserve our culture and family values.”
All this bile is in response to this gentle announcement by the organizers: “We create a welcoming environment where aspiring readers can celebrate diversity and inclusion, and break the stigma around harmful stereotypes through exposure to LGBTQ+ role models.”
These protests have the potential for violence, and we generally think our readers should be aware of potential violence. Our quandary is that the haters do what they do to garner publicity. They are largely unmoored in our society, and they want people to pay attention to them. If we write about their plans to protest, we give them exactly what they want.
Weighing on us, too, is the knowledge that most times, the lead-up publicity about events like this is often much more fiery than the actual events. Consider the protest in Geauga County last month. The rhetoric was fierce, particularly after the fire-bombing of a church hosting an event, but the actual protest involved a small number of people and was uneventful.
Of course, on March 11, hundreds of protesters from a variety of hate groups -- Proud Boys, White Lives Matter, Patriot National Front, neo-Nazis – showed up in Wadsworth to bark about blood in the streets and go at each other. Police had their hands full and made two arrests.
With the planned protest in Cleveland Saturday, we decided to monitor the buzz through the week. If it had started to grow, we might have written about it. As it happened, unless you knew where to look, you would not have known a protest was scheduled. We wrote nothing.
We did decide to be on hand to monitor the protest, in case it became violent or made news.
This is an issue we suspect we will revisit in coming months. These protests are multiplying, and the coming presidential election year is likely to inspire more kooks to take action.
I should make clear that our newsroom debate is not about covering the message of the haters. Their message is ridiculous. We don’t give publicity to such nonsense, whether it comes from white supremacists, antisemites or polarizing politicians. As we reported last month, the story hour protesters are mostly younger men who have been indoctrinated through online sites into buying absurd conspiracy theories and believing they are somehow protecting children from danger.
As with many issues we face in covering the news in these troubling times, there are not a lot of clearly right or wrong answers. We do the best we can to navigate, and we also do our best to lay out our thinking for you, the reader.
I’m at [email protected].
Thanks for reading.
