TO THE EDITOR:
UNC recently hosted Dumisani Washington, who is the Director of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel.
Also an educator and author, Pastor Washington was an invited guest at UNC by the student chapter of Christians United for Israel to discuss “Dr. Martin Luther King’s Pro-Israel Legacy and Social Justice Issues of the Middle East.” Seventy diverse students and community members listened, engaged and learned from Washington’s talk.
The article written by a Daily Tar Heel staff reporter who attended Washington’s talk started off with a title stating that the “Pro-Israel speaker inspires walk-out,” and then continued to paint a picture in which “the Union’s Great Hall was silent except for the sound of footsteps exiting the room” and that “Dumisani Washington stood speechless at the podium.”
These statements try to paint a picture of the talk and the events of the evening that are not true. Washington, far from speechless, actively told of his upbringing by his parents in the civil rights movement and asked the students to stay and engage with him and talked about how many on college campuses do not want dialogue or to listen to any narrative other than their own.
The article then proceeded to discuss mainly the student views by those who came to disrupt. Nothing of the substance of Washington’s talk was represented in the article, especially the serious analysis reported of King’s actual writing and speeches about Israel, the Pro-Israel advocacy by national African-American leaders who stood with King and how they both denounced selective, anti-Semitic targeting of the Israeli democracy.
What is perhaps more distressing about this latter article is the fact that the author was assigned, or volunteered to cover, Washington’s talk without revealing an anti-Israel bias, either to the editors of the paper, or to its readers. In several public tweets only days before the talk, the author criticized Israel and defended Hamas. Writing a news column without disclosing bias goes against journalistic ethical guidelines, principles that demand not only truthfulness but also objectivity, impartiality and fairness.
A major mission of journalism is to report local and world events accurately and fairly without discriminatory practice. Journalism that fails to adhere to such values goes against the values of our democratic ideals.
Adam Goldstein
