[donation]
By Joel Thurtell
Now some people will say I’m nuts for defending a reporter fired for wearing a political t-shirt to a political rally she was covering.
I’m talking about the case of Karen Dinkins, fired September 21, 2008 by Detroit radio station WWJ-AM for wearing a Barack Obama t-shirt while covering an Obama-for-President rally.
It is true that it would be hard to defend Dinkins in court.
Unless she had a contract with WWJ which might give her some wiggle room, it’s likely that under current law she would not have much of a case.
I mean, after all, she was on company time, wasn’t she? Doesn’t the station have a right to dictate what its employees wear at work?
Hmmm.
I wonder if WWJ did have a dress code. Would a t-shirt have been okay as long as it didn’t have Obama’s face on it?
Put differently, did WWJ before the Dinkins firing prohibit its reporters from wearing any kind of t-shirt?
Or were they discriminating against Obama t-shirts?
What if she’d worn a McCain t-shirt?
My guess is that they would have fired her for wearing McCain’s face, too.
So t-shirts are okay, except some are not.
Who will decide which t-shirts are political?
This is where things start getting gray fast.
No doubt about it, candidates like Obama are political. So are the major and minor political parties.
But what about organizations that are not political in function, yet take political stands?
What about, let’s say, churches? Certainly the Roman Catholic church and many Protestant churches, plus Jewish religious organizations as well as most others get behind their favorite issues.
They take stands for or against abortion, same-sex marriage, the state of Israel, and there are those that even go so far as endorsing or dissing political candidates.
The list grows: What about the Detroit Institute of Arts or the Detroit Symphony Orchestra? When it comes to arts funding, most cultural organizations turn political. They may say it’s a matter of survival, but it’s nonetheless politics. They call it lobbying.
How about, hmm, let’s say the Detroit Regional Chamber Political Action Committee?
Check their website if you don’t think they’re political. They endorse candidates for public office and hold fundraisers, like their annual Mackinac Island shindig for Michigan politicos. They skim the money left after paying chump change for the rubber chicken, and roll it into campaigns. The chamber supports — mostly conservative — candidates and causes.
Oh, I know, donating to the chamber’s PAC must be okay because top editors of the Detroit Free Press gave to it. The editors’ behavior is emblematic of the hypocrisy media moguls practice by banning employees’ political activity while going full speed ahead with their own. The Free Press has stated that its employees do not enjoy First Amendment rights. Paul Glendon, the arbitrator in my political donation case, urged media execs to police the CONTENT of their papers or signals, rather than gagging journalists.
By the way, the Free Press lost that attempt by some of those editors to stifle my right to expression when arbitrator Glendon earlier this year ordered the editors to rescind their ban on political contributions by employees.
Now, unless WWJ banned all t-shirts, I think Karen Dinkins has a prayer of challenging her dismissal on grounds that the t-shirt policy was discriminatory: What if she’d worn a Detroit Chamber PC t-shirt (if there is such a thing) or a Catholic church t-shirt? Would they have fired her? No? But those groups are political, too! So is the Salvation Army or the Boy Scouts.
But discrimination should not be Dinkins’ chief defense.
It need not be her defense at all.
The law may not uphold her wearing a political t-shirt NOW. But there was a time when the law in this country did not offer women and black people the right to vote. Yet there were those in the U.S. who believed — the law notwithstanding — that black people and women have equal rights.
Why shouldn’t journalists have a right to express themselves fully, on or off the job?
Really, what other occupation — medicine, law, accounting, plumbing, hairdressing, auto repair — polices the political expression of its practitioners?
The absurdity of this situation, once exposed, is boundless. Why, we license lawyers, doctors, plumbers, hairdressers, barbers, and yet the people who convey our news to us are unexamined, uncertified and fully unlicensed.
Given that journalists are self-appointed practitioners, having passed no journalism board exam, what authority does any one of them have to pass judgment on his or her colleagues?
Now I’m talking about the rank and file journalists, most of whom will echo the sentiments of Jane Briggs-Bunting, chairwoman of Michigan State University’s J school, in arguing that journalists are on duty all the time and must NEVER express a political opinion except when they vote with the secret ballot.
I’d be willing to bet there’s not a J school in the land with a faculty member who would disagree with Professor Briggs-Bunting. Hail to orthodoxy!
That means our newsrooms are packed with J school grads who have never thought about this issue independently. They graduate and go to work regurgitating edicts their profs either picked up in J school or in brain-numb newsrooms, passed on to them without reflection.
It works great for the corporations, who benefit from gagging journalists while they editorialize on politics and donate to their favorite candidates and causes in seeming violation of their own kangaroo court ruling.
It’s time for journalists to wake up, grab some bolt-cutters and slice off those chains.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
