The Editor's Log
More on the Nazis
My newspaper column
Last Saturday night, our editor on duty, Eddie Wooten, called me at home.
The Greensboro Police Department, he said, had asked that we not publish the name of the motel where a neo-Nazi group was staying.
The National Socialist Movement held a planning meeting at a Greensboro motel during the day, and presumably, many of the 50 to 70 attendees were staying overnight there.
The meeting was closed to the public — the public was distinctly not invited — and neither the group nor the police had announced where the meeting was.
But we knew where they were — at La Quinta — and had a reporter and photographer there.
Possibly because the location was kept under wraps, the meeting itself had gone on peacefully. But across the city, about 200 people attended an anti-racism rally downtown Saturday afternoon.
It was peaceful, too, with the exception of one incident: Two men dressed like Nazis had exchanged words with the anti-racism protesters. The men drove off with protesters chasing them on foot.
The police feared that if the name of the motel were mentioned in Sunday morning’s paper, something unfortunate might happen before the neo-Nazis checked out.
It’s fair to say that 1979 wasn’t far from anyone’s mind. That’s when members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party exchanged gunfire with members of the Communist Workers Party in a “Death to the Klan” rally here. Five marchers died.
The police request was a tough one for us. After all, the presumption in newsrooms here and across the country is that you publish what you know about the news of the day. The neo-Nazi meeting was certainly a news story. Their activities, that they decided to meet here of all places and that their visit caused protests made everything about them interesting.
For better or worse, as journalists we bristle when a government agency asks us to do something. We prefer to hold government accountable rather than join with it to keep information away from the public.
Still, the possibility of violence at La Quinta was real. (Sunday's newspaper story here.)
Two things tipped the balance in our decision: First, a guiding journalistic principle is to minimize harm to innocent people. Although you might not consider neo-Nazis innocent, the other people staying at the motel certainly were.
Second, I couldn’t explain to myself what public service we would be performing if we published the location of the neo-Nazis. What good would come from telling readers where they were? And did withholding the name of the motel harm the news story? Not that I could tell.
As a result, we didn’t identify the motel until Monday.
I knew the decision would be controversial, and judging from comments on my blog last week, it wasn’t the most popular decision I’ve made. Some called the omission censorship. Others said it indicated we are in the pocket of the police. (I suspect police officers reading that right now are chuckling.)
We know that we can publish just about anything. The question that hovers over this was whether we should.
I am interested to know what you think.
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