May I never be a viral TikTok video

Something I said, something I didn't say?

Forgive me. This is a little long:

I teach a college honors course that examines how the media covers/doesn’t cover poverty. The students come loaded for bear and I’ve spent 10 weeks this semester running to stay ahead of them.

I am always looking for new ways to present old ideas, and I’d thought that events in Israel-Palestine could be a living, breathing lab on how the media reports a situation with which the students might be familiar. I thought about that for an hour or so, but then backed away because 1) all it takes to sink a ship is one video of a professor being stupid and what if I said something inadvertently offensive? and 2) I didn’t feel up to the task. This, from Winona LaDuke:

We can’t talk about Israel because we can’t talk about Wounded Knee. Because we can’t talk about Sand Creek or Carlisle ‘Boarding School.’ Because we can’t talk about forced sterilization or small pox blankets or Kit Carson and his scorched earth policy in the Southwest. Because we have Andrew Jackson on our twenty dollar bill. Because we are one huge settlement on stolen land. We can’t talk about Israel because we are Israel.

I am not a timid person, but I feared diving into a hornet’s nest without the skills to get out. And then a student emailed me asking that we do this very thing. The student wanted to apply her new-found media consumer skills to Gaza.

Well, OK, then. I discussed a plan with another professor (my academic spirit animal; his name is Matthew), and came up with this: Prior to class, students would email me links to two stories (broadcast or print). They would choose one article that angered them because of what they perceived as bias or misinformation. The second article should be something they thought pretty even-handed.

Of course, their own biases would affect their choices, but these articles would get at least the conversation started.

And then I lost sleep over this as I awaited Monday’s class. I don’t know everyone’s background, but I look up every class and see a hijab, and on Jewish holidays, I mark observant Jewish students’ absences as excused.

I needn’t have worried.

As soon as class started, we divided into small groups to discuss their articles, and then we came together as a class. Immediately, some students pointed out interesting word choices (Israelis are “killed,” Palestinians “die”) while some admitted they didn’t know much but were willing to learn. We made lists, good, bad, and ugly and then talked about what made for good journalism. I wish I’d taken a photo of the white board. What we built was a description of what makes good and honest journalism.

The class ended and we could have talked more, but this was the single most nuanced discussion I’ve ever had in a college classroom, and I’ve been a part of some pretty good ones. I walked away hopeful that the heated rhetoric we see on social media can be quelled or at least quieted by thoughtful consideration of the words we use when we tell our stories.