Giving the People What They Want
Selling a book-banning scare to an eager and lazy press
By MARC HERMAN
To a reporter on a tight deadline, presented with research that seems, to one's gut, basically true, it is extremely attractive to skim a document you've been handed, paraphrase the first and last page, and file a story about its findings. For two years, in 1992 and 1993, I worked as a researcher for a political organization that understood this attraction and used it to market an essentially promotional document as research. Reporters lapped it up.
This was a liberal group I worked for, People For the American Way (PFAW), a 300,000-member civil liberties organization based in Washington, D.C. My job was to document and write about book banning in the public schools and, particularly, to investigate evidence of censorship promulgated by the religious right wing -- organizations like Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, James Dobson's Focus on the Family, Robert Simonds' Citizens for Excellence in Education, and Beverly LaHaye's Concerned Women for America. The document I helped write is a report called "Attacks on the Freedom to Learn," released by the group each September.
Hundreds of national and local stories subsequently appeared about which books were banned, and where. It's an alarming topic and an alarming report, mainly because it indicates that things seem to get worse every year. "Attacks" grabs headlines and, in doing so, grabs grant foundations' attention and other charity dollars from PFAW's civil liberties competition -- groups like the ACLU and the National Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee.
The problem is, those startling censorship numbers -- which invariably hit the editorial pages and then shape the nation's conventional wisdom -- are cooked.
Here's how it works: First, the assumption is made that a reporter would rather avoid legwork than do it, and that if you present a compelling story -- in this case about how the religious right really will censor books when they have the chance -- it will get printed, regardless of accuracy. Then you spend a year producing a document long enough to be truly exhaustively researched, understanding that the reporters will assume that extensive research will necessarily conform to rigorous standards, which of course it doesn't. It's entirely possible, for example, that if a problem seems to be getting steadily worse, you might just be getting better at looking for it.
Meanwhile, it all sounds very convincing as a soundbite. Certainly, attempts to take school books from kids are disturbing, and clearly the unjustified removal of books from classrooms happens. But in general, textbook censorship -- from what I saw in my two years studying it -- can be thought of as a lot like littering: it happens, and it shouldn't, but the problem has not really changed much for quite some time. "It's always been there. It's not that it's getting worse, but it's taking different forms," said Dalia Kandiyoti of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a New York anti-censorship organization, prior to the release of PFAW's 1995 report. "I don't think anyone can say that there's been more textbook censorship."
This is what the report omits in the interest of publicity -- all because simple, worsening trends get ink, while a complex, consistent issue isn't such a sure bet. PFAW's "most challenged book in America," (which was often "Of Mice and Men," but changes every year) for example, has usually elicited fewer than 10 complaints nationwide each year among the country's roughly 20,000 elementary and 60,000 secondary public schools. (As a result, PFAW purposely avoids giving any raw numbers with its list of banned books, the organization's head of communications once explained to me.) And of those 10 or 20 complaints -- and they are usually complaints, not witch hunts -- most probably never get beyond a gripe directed to a school librarian. In most cases (a consistent 60 percent by PFAW's tally), the complaints ultimately result in either very limited or no restriction of the book in question. Of the remaining 40 percent of incidents, those where there is some level of censorship, many cases involve books being reassigned from lower libraries to upper libraries for arguably sound reasons of age-appropriateness. Again, the press doesn't catch this because they didn't look very hard at research that sounds suitably alarming at first glance.
The one time in my memory that a reporter, a man from one of the Chicago dailies, asked whether the report's spiraling year-to-year statistical picture indicated a worsening problem or only better research, we just lied to him until he went away. We told him that our research methods had been consistent since the mid-'80s, and that in no way were we casting a broader net or looking under new rocks. This also was simply false.
In 1993, our new study was not on pace to surpass the previous year's total, and I recall telling a superior the good news that censorship appeared to be easing up. He told me that he had faith I could make things look worse, that we needed it to look worse. So I did. I began to joke to friends about being the person singlehandedly responsible for most of the censorship in the United States.
Interestingly enough, one of the biggest single-year jumps in censorship recorded in the report's 12-year history coincidentally occurred the year we installed a new database for the project. Go figure.
Eventually I quit. I can't blame that one inquisitive Chicago reporter for not knowing about the ploy, and being lied to about our methodology, but he could have answered his own question had he read the report. Most of "Attacks" is an incident-by-incident breakdown of censorship attempts organized by state. Had he read the report, he would have realized that most of the documented incidents were extremely minor, hardly book burnings, and pressed us a bit more.
It's no news that people in Washington lie, and that PFAW's report is certainly not the only example of a problem being kept "alive" for the sake of an organization's press profile. But it's also true that some non-profits and lobbies in Washington do remarkably even-handed research. In many camps it would be unthinkable to accept PFAW's assertions that ends justify means.
The solution is very simple: Reporters need to thoroughly examine any story they write about, no matter how superficially good it looks. Having gone from propagandist to reporter, I submit that this basic rule can't be reasserted too often.
Marc Herman is a political writer and commentator living in Washington, D.C.