Last September, on my first real day as opinion editor for the Ubyssey, the University of British Columbia’s campus newspaper, a student said something rather odd to me.
“We’re going to disagree on a lot,” he said, approaching me after I'd introduced myself to the reporting team during our first staff meeting of the year.
“Are you a member of the Jewish community?” he asked.
I’m Jewish. I don’t hide my identity, and those who know me know I’m very proud to be. I used “Shalom” while introducing myself to the group, as I often do casually among friends.
This wasn’t the first time I saw my views assumed by way of my Jewishness, but it was something I had been concerned about when I first took the job months before.
My team was supportive of me immediately after the incident, though it made me more aware of the challenges I’d face in my role, and have more empathy for my contributors, who'd likely be facing worse than me.
As opinion editor, I saw it — and still see it — as my job to platform perspectives. I’m not here to highlight my own views; I’m here to help people share theirs, subject only to ethical and legal limitations.
This is something all newspapers strive for, but the diversity of perspectives is never evenly distributed, and not everyone’s voices are equitably represented in Canadian opinion journalism. I wanted to do my part to help change that.
My conviction towards delivering an opinion section that was truly accessible to all contributors’ views was greatly influenced by my years of advocacy for press freedom in Canada. I’m acutely aware that an opinion editor is a newspaper gatekeeper with the power to mediate marginalization in the marketplace of ideas.
The last thing I want to do is to continue to fail readers and contributors underserved and oppressed by journalism at large — it’s my ethical and editorial imperative and personal belief in the relevance of the Jewish maxim “Never again” to fight against doing so.
So like all the subjects I edit articles about, my views on the Israel-Palestine conflict are necessarily concealed. And I know that my “neutral” phrasing and use of the word “conflict” alone is enough to invite suspicions as to what I may or may not believe.
Depending on whose views I publish or what story I report on, I can expect to be accused of either antisemitism or Islamophobia, as has been conveyed to me in thousands of emails. (The content of which pales in comparison to the aggressive harassment faced by my female and racialized colleagues in the field.)
Fellow Jews have written to me identifying themselves as Jewish, pronouncing on behalf of our community that my newspaper is a contemporary Der Stürmer — the unofficial press accessory to the Third Reich. They are usually unaware of what we share in common until my surname appears in my email signature, or until I briefly disclose my own connection to the Khurban.
Sometimes, people will use that to try to appeal to me on an emotional level, with the aim of censoring others.
Other times, people will get pretty close to suggesting I'm a self-hating Jew.
I believe in intellectual humility and reflexivity, and I reject whatever my knee-jerk initial view is in favour of reading every complaint I receive.
If it’s not an email campaign, I'll almost always respond in as much detail as required, practising what I refer to as “open journalism,” giving reasons and referring to procedure wherever I can.
With the summer term now on at UBC, I’m looking back at the academic year that was — and forward to my next year as opinion editor that will be.
Here are four interconnected things I’ve come to appreciate more in the last year.
1. Conversation works.
My ethically imposed silence has given me the unique opportunity to learn from others’ speech. While I will not reveal the personal outcomes of that learning, I will reveal my belief that conversation works.
That said, contributors to my own section have convincingly argued that there are hidden problems that lurk within institutional calls for “robust discussion” and “dialogue.”
So, while I certainly believe in conversation as a deliberative, action-oriented mechanism, I am simultaneously alert to the pedantic, privileged and somewhat cringeworthy nature of my appeal to “conversation” as a remedy to polarization.
Such appeals are usually used to shut down actual discussion by those imparting hegemonic perspectives, and interpreted by those holding hyper-visible and hyper-scrutinized minority views as a way to stifle action with process.
But perhaps naively, I humbly submit my suggestion is worth more consideration than the typical call you’ve likely encountered before — which I again concede is sometimes worthy of dismissal. I say this because, unlike most of you, I do not have the option to select which discussions and dialogues I tune in to, or when it is convenient for me to listen.
The only way I've developed a practice of being relatively adequate at listening to people is through my part-time editorial role that quite literally forces me to do nothing but listen.
In the beginning of the year, I was content with my level of knowledge about Israel and Palestine. I felt confident in the validity of my views and was comfortable identifying stances I agreed and disagreed with, and why. Over the year, working with contributors challenged, changed or confirmed various aspects of what I thought about the conflict.
Comment line by comment line and question by question, as I ask contributors to explain their ideas “to readers,” I become a transitory student of another person’s writings before performing the functions of editor.
2. Press freedom and editorial transparency matter.
Freedom from government interference in the press is only as good as how willing editors are to let someone exercise those constitutional rights on their pages. Readers have a right to hear from any contributor, regardless of what their views may be.
Contributors also have a right to be aided to the fullest extent by their editors, in service of developing their arguments — as well as to have their right to publish defended vigorously in the face of demands that such a right be extinguished.
Censorial demands from cohorts of readers must not be allowed to overtake a newspaper’s commitment to diversity of thought. And at my newspaper, they don’t.
While my current role has me editing subjective pieces that are generally responsive to the news, I still maintain a foot in the door doing news reporting, working with our team covering the encampment at UBC.
News and opinion rely on people to make and express them, respectively, and are impossible without each other.
Both are under threat when we as journalists fail to explain how and why we make editorial decisions.
Editorial procedure protects our professional ethics and readers’ rights.
In an industry that suffers from a lack of trust, we have a lot of work to do in educating our readers about the work we’re asking them to place their confidence in.
3. This work is uncomfortable.
Somewhat ironically inspired by the mantra of the civil service, I deliver editorial advice and recommendations to all contributors I work with, no matter what normative arguments they forward. They decide their arguments and I help implement them.
I can't do that at all unless I've understood and internalized every premise and co-premise behind their view.
It's impossible to overstate how tremendously difficult this actually is to do — which initially became most apparent to me even before I was able to get to contributors' main arguments.
Nearly every article I've ever been asked to publish since Oct. 7 has come with a request to maintain the contributor's anonymity.
The issue of anonymity in opinion sections is one of the most pressing conversations in journalistic ethics and is constantly being renegotiated and re-evaluated.
People will usually tell me that their marginalized identity, as well as their views on Israel and Palestine, places them in a position of extreme vulnerability.
To address these questions, I developed an imperfect three-part test for when my section will consider running an anonymous op-ed — centred on the gravity of the need for anonymity, the novelty of the views expressed, and the estimated value to public discussion. So far, no applicant has met all three criteria and I’ve always had to say no.
It’s hard, and I'm constantly reflecting on how well I'm working on my objective of platforming those of equity-deserving identities.
4. ‘Censorship is no friend of social justice.’
I've had the privilege of working with contributors across a range of views who commendably carried on without anonymity and eventually signed their names. But that's only one challenge: after articles are published, I'll get emails demanding I take down the piece, saying pieces are offending a reader on the basis of their identity.
These moments necessitate some of the most cognitively and affectively challenging decisions I've ever made as journalist — and while at the Ubyssey and elsewhere, I've been threatened with police intimidation, SLAPP lawsuits (strategic lawsuits against public participation) and arrest doing journalism over the years.
Every editorial decision I make I am answerable for if a reader asks — a view inspired not by journalism but by administrative law and my research on public bureaucracies. I take it seriously when someone writes to me expressing they find offence in something my section has published.
So far, I've never revisited a decision to publish something and been convinced I should override a contributor's right to express themselves. Mere offence short of a breach of ethical imperatives to minimize harm or Section 7 of the Human Rights Code is not enough for me to limit a contributor's writings, regardless of how I may feel personally.
I maintain my view and that of journalism generally that, as library science and intellectual freedom scholar Emily Knox says, “censorship is no friend of social justice.”
Those who bravely share their views in opinion articles have my complete admiration for their fortitude in difficult times. Reasoned arguments on a newspaper’s pages move us beyond paralysis and polarization.
My only intervention is that as somebody who is effectively paid to look at and listen to others' written expression, I don't believe discussion and debate are luxuries we can no longer enjoy. Under the right conditions, it works.
An imperfect, constant striving
I'm always going to stand for freedom of expression and protect my contributors' and readers' rights from non-journalistic and non-legal constraints on what I publish. If you have an intelligent perspective, I'm going to do my best to platform you.
In exchange for the privilege of being able to work as opinion editor, my views become especially mine to keep secret, with a few exceptions — one of which is the view I've formed after listening to so many others: Don’t be afraid to read or hear ideas you think you’ll dislike.
We can’t expect to escape our own echo chambers by walling ourselves off from ideas we claim are less than our own. Apprehension to persuasion should be viewed with suspicion, and seen as an absence of argumentative confidence.
As long as you're grounded in reflectivity and intellectual humility, conversation is the best way to confirm your own perspective or become convinced of another.
Nobody is perfect at it — especially not me — but anybody can become better at it with a credible commitment to trying.
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