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In late July, a group of student-journalism advisers convened on Zoom to discuss a brewing controversy over opinion, reporting, and religion. They were preparing for MediaFest—the nation’s largest conference of student reporters and their mentors, which will take place in Washington, DC, this week. Steven Sandberg, a student media adviser at Oregon State University, had been browsing the event schedule when he came upon a list of speakers slated for a portion of the conference called the “faith track.” “I saw pretty far-right, anti-LGBTQ language,” he said. He raised his concerns with MediaFest’s organizers—the College Media Association (CMA), the Associated Collegiate Press, and the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)—which prompted a fierce debate about the ethics of platforming certain figures, and revealed that the world of student journalism can be just as polarized as the mainstream.
Speaking with coordinators of the event, Sandberg said on Zoom that he wasn’t willing to send his students to MediaFest if it included Virginia Allen, of the Daily Signal; Mary Margaret Olohan, the author of Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult, who writes for the Daily Wire; and Michael Ryan, of The Lion, a publication owned by the Herzog Foundation, a conservative nonprofit that promotes biblical values and covers Christian education, politics, and culture, often from an anti-abortion, anti-trans perspective. “These speakers’ work doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” Sandberg recalled telling MediaFest’s planners. “LGBTQ students are feeling targeted by our administration, by the government, and by society. So I was disappointed to see them bring in people who espoused anti-LGBT views.”
Some on the call suggested that Sandberg was trying to “cancel” the speakers; others said that he was attempting to shield his students from reality. A few of the event’s organizers stressed that speakers’ personal opinions shouldn’t matter. “I don’t necessarily care if they lead sessions on A, B, C, when my issues with them are actually X, Y, Z,” said Wesley Wright, the executive director of ReNews, a nonprofit that restarts dormant newspapers at historically Black colleges, who was part of a three-person committee that helped MediaFest’s organizers plan the faith track.
That wasn’t quite Sandberg’s point. “I said we should judge them based on the quality of their journalism and what they’re writing about,” he told me. In the end, Sandberg’s argument won over MediaFest, which promptly nixed the talks by Allen and Olohan. Ryan remained on the schedule but later dropped out, telling the organizers it was for health reasons. (None of the would-be speakers could be reached for comment.) “We didn’t eliminate them because of their opinion,” Michael Koretzky, the SPJ’s ethics committee chairman, who set up the Zoom call and helped program the talks, said of Allen and Olohan. “We did it because they were selectively quoting and manipulating the news to bolster their opinion.” He doesn’t believe in protecting students from anti-trans or anti-abortion views, or other rhetoric. “If you’re going to be a journalist,” he said, “you’re going to run into a lot worse than this.”
Soon, the Zoom discussion gave way to yet more scrutiny of the faith track’s schedule, which initially had only Christian speakers on the list. Koretzky defended the lineup by noting that most religious schools associated with SPJ and CMA are Christian. “If something is considered right or left, I don’t give a crap—I care about how many people believe something,” he said. “If a significant amount of people believe something—say, they believe the Earth is flat—then that needs to be addressed.”
But in recent weeks, MediaFest’s schedule has been amended to include people from other religious backgrounds. There will be more than twenty faith track speakers, on panels tackling such questions as “Can the Bible inform reporters on how to cover the news?” and discussing censorship on the basis of faith. “We even have a Muslim coming,” said Naomi Balk—who serves as the assistant director of the World Journalism Institute, the training branch of a nonprofit Christian news organization, World News Group, and was part of the committee that helped plan the faith track. “Even though there have been tensions, I am just really grateful to live in the United States of America, where we have rights that can be protected,” she told me. “This convention is just a really wonderful opportunity to create a platform for different voices.”
For educators such as Sandberg, the discourse around the faith track has posed a challenge as he aims to train the next generation of journalists. Even with the revisions the conference has made, he said, he’s decided not to attend. His students won’t be there, either. “The CMA and SPJ should have been a lot more cognizant of the impact of the speakers they were choosing,” he told me. “While I think they did the right thing in reviewing their work and taking them out, their response was very defensive and a little disingenuous. I want to see them do better in the future—and when they do, that’s when I’ll decide whether we want to go.”
Still, MediaFest anticipates a strong turnout. Danielle McLean, a trans journalist who has written for national publications, plans to go. “I think it’s perfectly fine to have reporters that hold anti-trans views and characterize trans people in a negative light,” she said. “One of the main tenets of the Society of Professional Journalists is supporting the open and civil exchange of views, even if repugnant.”
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