Student Finds Free Speech Cuts Both Ways

When the world turned against Daniel Hernandez, he found solace by calling home.

Hernandez, 20, rarely relies on his immigrant parents in times of crisis. He’s a full-time student at UC Berkeley and full-time editor of his campus newspaper. He’s learned to handle his own problems, for the most part.

This time was different. Hernandez woke up two weeks ago and found himself at the center of a furious media storm, pilloried from left and right. Angry protesters appeared at his office door. Condescending columnists rebuked him in big-city newspapers. More than 500 e-mail messages, mostly negative with “obscenities galore,” flamed through his computer.

He was in a state of “total agony” by the time he reached his mother, a librarian in his hometown of San Diego. He’d been abandoned by friends who called him a sellout and excoriated by editors who urged him to leave journalism. Who else could he turn to?

The young man’s troubles stemmed from a controversial full-page ad that had slipped into the Daily Californian without the normal review. It ran Feb. 28, the final day of Black History Month, under the explosive headline: “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea--and Racist Too.”

Demonstrators at my alma mater confiscated copies of the edition and angrily demanded their own reparations for what they considered a racist message. The next day, the paper printed a front-page apology for allowing itself “to become an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry.” Hernandez, an English major, promises a review of the paper’s procedures to make “sure this never happens again.”

The ad was placed by author and professional provocateur David Horowitz, renegade ‘60s radical who now runs a right-wing think tank in Los Angeles. This Commie-turned-Tory argues that blacks don’t deserve reparations because, for one, they are much better off today than they would be if their ancestors had never been kidnapped from their African homelands. That’s like saying a sex slave should be grateful because her wealthy captors provide nicer accommodations than she had before her abduction.

Welfare as Reparation?

Horowitz also claims that blacks have received trillions of dollars in restitution in the form of benefits like welfare. But what about whites, who are the majority on welfare rolls? What historic wrong are they being compensated for?

I’m not sure Horowitz really knows what’s good for the majority of African Americans, whom he dismisses as mindless sheep for voting as a solid Democratic block. This is the man who once hailed the Black Panthers as liberators. Now he can’t grasp why the masses don’t embrace black conservatives like Ward Connerly, the UC regent who also scolded Hernandez and threatened to stop talking to Daily Cal reporters, in the name of free speech, of course.

Only a handful of college papers ran the slavery ad; more than two dozen turned it down. Berkeley was singled out for scorn because its published apology clashed with its free speech reputation.

In the Washington Post, a columnist pedantically corrected Hernandez’s grammar and ordered him back to Journalism 101 for claiming that ads are not protected by the 1st Amendment. And via e-mail, an editor for London’s Financial Times harrumphed: “Good God, if you’re bothered about offending people, why are you a journalist?”

How simplistic--or hypocritical. Every publication worries about offending its readers. The New York Times recently refused to run an ad for Spike Lee’s latest movie, “Bamboozled,” saying the satirical depiction of cartoonish figures in blackface was offensive.

Maybe defending an angry black filmmaker doesn’t inspire the high-minded protectors of the 1st Amendment. Or maybe their outrage is selective.

Free speech is an ideal, but newspapers are a service. They all struggle with the question Hernandez posed in his apology: “How should a newspaper define what is tasteful, appropriate, bigoted or detrimental to its readership?”

The irony is that the Daily Cal broke away from the university in 1971 after regents tried to fire editors for an editorial considered--guess what--inflammatory. The paper has operated independently since its student staff stood up to the reactionary forces Horowitz now champions.

Hernandez, who plans to intern at The Times this summer, believes an issue as sensitive as reparations is best presented in a balanced format. He’s right. Certainly, slavery should not be trivialized like a topic for a David Letterman Top 10 list.

Hernandez also was right in taking his mother’s advice.

“Don’t try too hard to appease everybody,” she told her son in Spanish. “Stand by what you’re saying.”

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesdays and Saturdays. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.