The situation began on Feb. 8, when the independent Badger Herald published an article about an unruly party held by AEPi, a campus fraternity.
Reader comments to that story and follow-up stories about the fraternity’s suspension included anti-Semitic statements, such as suggestions that the fraternity should be “turned into an oven” and references to “Coasties,” a term often used as a slur against Jewish students.
In a Feb. 11 editorial, Badger Herald editor Jason Smathers called those comments “out of line and irrelevant.” He announced that the publication would begin moderating its online comments to eliminate “those who seek to blare nonsense over the more reasoned voices.”
Those incendiary comments drew students’ attention. A growing group of Jewish students “started looking seriously at the paper and its comments section — what was going on there and why it was problematic,” said Greg Steinberger, executive director of UW Hillel Foundation.
So when they noticed a small text ad promulgating Holocaust denial, the students responded quickly, Steinberger said.
The online ad was taken by known Holocaust denier Bradley Smith on Feb. 17 and was posted on the newspaper’s site the following day. A Badger Herald staff member approved the ad apparently without reading it and accepted the $75 payment for a 30-day posting.
Five days later, after Steinberger and students began to raise objections about the ad, newspaper staff first paid attention to the ad, according to an open letter from the publication’s board of directors that was published almost a month later, in the March 12 edition.
In spite of numerous student and faculty objections, Smathers chose to keep the ad posted until the end of its 30-day run on March 17.
In a Feb. 25 editorial, he wrote: “This newspaper has made a principle of accepting any individual or group advertisement submitted. The only cases in which we would reject an advertisement are if it exhibits threats toward any person or group or is of a libelous nature. This advertisement, while certainly fueled by veiled anti-Semitism, does not rise to the level of threats and therefore does not merit rejection.”
Smathers continued: “To remove this advertisement would assume our community lacks the intellectual integrity to properly define this [Holocaust denial] movement as an affront to objective truths.”
In an opinion article published March 2 in The Badger Herald, UW Chancellor Biddy Martin, a German studies scholar, urged the campus community to action.
“I hope members of our community will use this opportunity to do more than take sides for or against The Badger Herald’s decision to run an ad placed by Holocaust deniers,” Martin wrote.
“I hope you will combat lies and distortion with education,” she wrote.
In the meantime, a group of Jewish students had started to coalesce, Steinberger said.
“That was the biggest thing, giving the Jewish community a voice,” said Matthew Fox, senior and journalism major. “We felt that something needed to be said, and it was.”
“This was the most intense organized effort that naturally or organically came from a group of students [in my 10-year tenure], Steinberger said. “They were frustrated, angry and indignant but they wanted it to be constructive.”
Using social media like Twitter and Facebook, those students organized other students. They circulated a petition asking The Badger Herald to remove the ad. And they helped organize two different events sponsored by the Hillel — a rally and an ethics forum.
The rally, which took place on March 3, drew a crowd of approximately 100, according to The Badger Herald. Steinberger estimates the number of participants closer to 350-400.
“It wasn’t an anti-Badger Herald rally; that was never the point,” Fox explained. “It was to raise awareness about the Holocaust and to respond to this Holocaust denier.”
The day after the rally, Hillel and the Office of the Dean of Students co-sponsored a panel discussion themed “Journalism, Ethics, and Sensitivity Forum.”
The panel included: journalism professors Katy Culver, Stephen Ward and Lew Friedland; science professor Howard Schweber; Smathers; Charles Brace, editor-in-chief of the Daily Cardinal; and Tyler Junger, chair of the Associated Students of Madison. Dean of Students Lori Berquam moderated the event.
In an interview after the event, Culver said that while the forum was a good idea, it ended up not fulfilling the purpose that it was intended to fill, to help students resolve the hurt that this anti-Semitism caused.
Culver and Friedland both reported that Smathers spent the majority of the forum defending the paper and the actions that they took.
“I found the forum frustrating,” Culver said.
“I was concerned that students in the room who felt hurt and offended didn’t get anything out of that forum to help them get past that, and the students who made the decision didn’t get anything out of that forum to help them reason their way through to a different outcome. So, all in all, it seemed like a lot of talking happened but not a lot of progress.”
The forum did not sway The Badger Herald to change its position. In an open letter to the UW community printed in the March 12 edition, the board of directors reflected on its errors.
“This paper made many mistakes,” they admitted, noting the lack of formal oversight of the online advertisements and the lack of a system to block hateful comments from the publication’s online comment boards.”
The directors also acknowledged the harm caused by their actions. “In making our original decision to keep the ad, we did not fully recognize the virulence of anti-Semitism still present today and how that could cause our students not only offense, but fear.
“We now realize the degree to which this ad and the comments have made Jewish members of our community feel vulnerable on campus.”
They also committed to crafting new advertising and commenting policies and announced a decision not to renew Smith’s ad.
That didn’t satisfy Friedland, who teaches a mass communications and society class this semester.
“They’ve substituted stubbornness for having an open mind, which is precisely what they are in principle defending,” Friedland said in an interview. “They say their stubbornness is somehow a defense of the First Amendment, but it’s not.”
“The Herald has acted with reckless disregard toward the campus community as a whole and toward the Jewish community in particular,” he wrote in a March 8 article published online by the Center for Journalism Ethics.
“They do not understand that the First Amendment is not a shield from moral responsibility, and that, indeed, given their right not to publish, they are effectively certifying ads as presenting views that are worthy of presentation, i.e. within the pale of reasonable debate.
“It is an amoral response, hiding behind a poorly constructed understanding of the First Amendment.”
In a March 15 interview, Nick Penzenstadler, publisher of The Badger Herald, says that the Herald is still dealing with the repercussions of the advertisement and article and trying to reformulate the way that things are done at the collegiate newspaper.
“We are still in the process of reworking our advertising and comment policies,” Penzenstadler said. “That includes working with other newspapers across the country in both university and commercial environments.”
Penzenstadler also explained that the Madison Jewish community has made it clear that they were hurt by the choices that the Herald made.
“In our meetings with some of the Jewish community it was made clear that we’ve lost some of their respect,” Penzenstadler said. “We have acknowledged many of the Jewish community’s concerns and hope to regain some of the trust that may have been lost. Our initial meetings with Hillel and campus leaders were very forward looking, and even discussed utilizing Hillel’s new facility on campus to help us connect with students.”
Steinberger hopes that the Herald will find ways to better the publication after this incident because he can already see how damaging this situation will be to current as well as prospective students.
“It’s an emotional and real issue for Jewish students,” he said in a March 5 interview. “The bad guy here is on one hand the Holocaust denier, but really it is the malfeasance of the paper and of the community.”
“I think the Herald, everybody blew it,” he said on March 19. “There is not a person who behaved valiantly involved with the organization of the paper on this. They all have learned a lot but the question is, will they have institutional memory when the staff changes?”
One negative result is Jewish students’ sense of security on campus, Steinberger said. “They were rattled.”
The ripple effect is that … now I’m walking down the street and someone says something that I never considered offensive and now I’m worried that it’s a double entendre,” he said, speaking from the students’ perspective.
A silver lining, Steinberger said, is the student activism. “I think we have a group of students who feel a sense of pride in themselves and hopefully in our leadership.
“This will be one of the things that, 20 years from now, they will remember of their college experience.”
Milwaukee native Michelle A. Langer is a sophomore at UW-Madison double majoring in theater and journalism. She writes on campus for the Daily Cardinal and the Hillel magazine, The Voice.
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