At Columbia University, The Stenographers Strike Back
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Columbia University is currently home to one of the highest-profile student protests against the American-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. On Sunday, elite political America decided they have had enough of the kids driving this debate and began to push back, beginning with the White House and the aid of high-profile journalists eschewing their jobs in favor of stenography.
Stenography is the act of simply writing down the words that other people say. A court stenographer recording everything uttered during a trial is an example of this work being valuable. Journalism is not stenography. If Donald Trump tells me that he is the smartest president ever and I publish that in Splinter bereft of any accompanying context (like, well, he’s clearly not), I’m not doing journalism, I’m just a member of his PR team.
Letting unreliable narrators dictate their coverage is one of the most consistent mainstream media tropes that is so routinely cynical it led NBC’s Chuck Todd to blow a gasket on live TV a month ago. On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper provided a perfect example of this kind of nonsense that far too many mainstream stenographers try to pass off as journalism these days, and in some ways, it’s worse because the claims he was repeating without evidence are generally correct while still being hyperbolic.
On Sunday morning, Tapper shared a message on Twitter from Rabbi Elie Buechler, writing “In response to ‘horrific’ scenes of antisemitic harassment at and around campus, the Orthodox Rabbi at Columbia/Barnard sent a WhatsApp message to more than 290+ Jewish students this morning recommending that they go home until it’s safe again for them on campus.”
Tapper did not provide any evidence of these “horrific” scenes, even when faced with pushback. He did tell one person on Twitter that there was a “fuller story to come,” but he did not post it to Twitter, despite feeling it was important enough to highlight the Rabbi’s claims to start this whole mess.
Colleagues in the media: If you are regurgitating extremist/alarmist rhetoric painting these students as violent and hostile without doing actual journalism and stepping foot on campus, you’re helping to make the situation more dangerous.
— Karen Attiah (@KarenAttiah) April 21, 2024
This is not to cast doubt on what the Rabbi alleged. The student journalists at Columbia Spectator showed Jake Tapper how to do his job and documented antisemitic abuse directed at Jewish Columbia students. Here is just one example of a video they reviewed among many:
As the students were exiting campus from the 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue gates on Saturday night, there were calls from individuals outside of campus of “Yehudim [Jews], yehudi [Jew], fuck you,” “Stop killing children,” and “Go back to Poland, go back to Belarus,” according to a video reviewed by Spectator.
How dangerous it actually is for Jewish Columbia students right now is not as obvious as Tapper’s stenography made it seem, and Columbia/Barnard Hillel is not following Rabbi Buechler’s calls to leave campus. They released a statement saying the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life will remain open. Tapper did not publicize that statement on his Twitter, but he did highlight this one from them announcing that the NYPD will be at the Kraft Center through Passover. In Tapper’s attempt to push a narrative he clearly believed was in service of the Kraft Center, he wound up distorting what the Kraft Center has actually been saying through the omission of inconvenient facts which counter the portrayal of Columbia that he spent much of Sunday defending.