Letters to the editor: You are the handmaiden of fascism

To the editor:

My name is Elliott Harwell. I’m a spokeswoman for the Trans Alliance of Lane County; on your website, you can find excerpts of my previous public comments to Lane County’s Board of Commissioners. While I appreciate the work you do reviewing and summarizing footage from meetings of the local government, I have serious ethical concerns about which voices you elevate, and how you frame those voices.

Your website purportedly follows the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. Among its tenets, I would like to draw especial attention to:

• Journalists should provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing, or summarizing a story.
• Journalists should show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage.
• Journalists should avoid pandering to lurid curiosity, even if others do.
• Journalists should consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication.

Your coverage of the public comments for and against the county’s passage of a statement supporting undocumented residents and transgender people fails all four of these admonitions.

Your first article on the county’s statement, “What sanctuary also means: The hit-and-run driver who left us to die on the highway” was published within 24 hours of the commissioner meeting. It summarized only one public comment, that of a woman who suffered a terrible tragedy and who now blames that tragedy on an undocumented immigrant. She is allowed to express her anger, and to have her anger heard—but you made a choice that hers should be the only voice about Lane County’s statement publicized on your website, for almost a week. And make no mistake, this was a choice, one that gives a platform to sensational, lurid details in favor of presenting context; a choice to immortalize the efforts of hundreds, even thousands, of Lane County residents to protect civil liberties—not with appropriate context, not with nuance or fidelity to detail, but with a breathless story of a dark-skinned illegal immigrant destroying the life of a white, blonde woman. So much for having an ethical obligation; your publication appears no different from an old racist newspaper, trying to inspire a lynching.

Your second article, “Unanswered questions after the sanctuary vote,” is perhaps worse. The article’s title, introduction and conclusion present some of the most extreme comments made against the sanctuary promise as fact, ultimately laundering bigotry as a reasonable concern.

“How can we afford these expensive treatments for gender dysphoria, when many in Lane County are going without health care?” Important context about what the statement does is notably absent from your news site, so one speaker repeating a baseless lie that gender-affirming care increases Medicaid costs is immortalized as fact in your article’s introduction.

A better, more ethical publication might explain that the statement specifically affirms transgender people’s right to medical care, and that the county supporting the legal rights of transgender people does not increase the cost of medical care in Lane County.

And if your publication is too pressed for manpower to actually analyze what it is publishing, it could at least avoid describing gender-affirming care as “expensive,” or accepting as fact a sensationalized and bigoted worldview that frame medical care as finite, puts trans healthcare in opposition to “regular” healthcare, and tacitly blames a minority for making medical services more expensive in our area.

“And how can we respect the rights of transgender persons while also respecting the religious beliefs of those citing the most sacred books of their religions?” As with the transgender medical care, this is another false dichotomy, one which validates extremism by lauding it as something worthy of respect. Many local religious communities came out in support of the county’s statement, including Temple Beth Israel and the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, valuable context that your sensationalist framing ignores. Instead, your summary chooses to immortalize “the rights of transgender persons” as being in opposition to “the most sacred books” of religious believers.

I’m not certain if you know this, but fascism isn’t just on the rise—it’s here. It’s unfortunate that people like you, who proclaim they are clear-eyed defenders of the public weal, who espouse their commitment to the ethical dissemination of the truth, have decided to be fascism’s handmaidens. To be clear, my criticism isn’t that you’ve republished public comments opposed to my and my organization’s goals. It’s that you provide no context, show no compassion to the disenfranchised, pander to the basest sensationalism, and give no thought to how your publication’s thoughtless summaries will shape our community.

I hope that for my sake, and the sake of my trans community, and the sake of my undocumented neighbors, you put in the effort and the ethics your profession demands.

Sincerely,
Elliott Harwell