Arthur Miller, playwright and one-time husband of Marilyn Monroe, offered the following definition for editors: “A
good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”
Overall, that’s not bad.
But there are readers who would disagree with it.
This week I heard from some of them about the article in last Sunday’s edition headlined: “Japanese-Americans’ Role in
World War II Debated.”
Some readers accused the newspaper of being racist for printing the article.
Allow this synopsis of the article:
An exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., examines the Japanese-American internment camps in
World War II, the 100th Battalion, an all Japanese-American unit, and the 442nd Regimental Combat team, a group of
Japanese-Americans who volunteered for service while being held in internment camps.
The exhibit, “A More Perfect Union,” has been in place for 15 years, but was challenged for accuracy by a retired Army
officer living in Provo. The Smithsonian ignored him. He went to Utah Rep. Chris Cannon, who applied some political
pressure and got the museum to pay attention.
The exhibit will be changed to reflect a lower number of Purple Hearts and Silver Stars being awarded to these soldiers
than enumerated in the display.
So far, so good.
But some readers objected to the pedigree of the man from Provo. In the article, reporter Dawn House pointed out that
Lee Allen has published a book maintaining the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps was perfectly logical and the
proper decision.
House also quoted a number of Japanese-Americans, including Ted Nagata, who designed the recently dedicated
memorial at the Topaz internment camp in Utah.
The article describes some people’s experiences in internment camps and at the hands of the Japanese in POW camps.
However, one reader from San Francisco sent an e-mail that said in part: ” . . . Thankfully, I don’t live in Salt Lake City
where obviously racism and intolerance exists, otherwise you would have never printed this article.”
Au contraire. There indeed may be racists living in Utah, but they are not running the news pages of The Salt Lake
Tribune. Instead, the editors who shepherd stories in the newsroom are thoughtful, interested people who understand that
all aspects of the human condition are of interest to readers. Painful and challenging topics often are fodder for the best
efforts of the staff writers and their editors.
It’s no coincidence that the Founding Parents wrote about freedom of the press so early in their government framework.
It is no accident that in a coup d’etat a new government works first to capture the radio and television stations and the
printing presses.
The freedom to speak aloud what you think, no matter how reprehensible others may find your content, is a basic one in
a democracy.
And that is where we live in this country — in the midst of a roiling, heaving, living thing that reinvents itself in every
election, that criticizes itself and wrings its hands over its wrongs, that beats itself up when it behaves badly. It is the best
of us and it is the worst of us.
Tom Harvey, editor for the government and education desk and the man who helped reporter House make this story fair
and balanced, had this to say:
“We took great pains to ensure that the story was sensitive and fair. It had a solid news peg, the fact that the
Smithsonian was changing some of the information on a long-standing exhibit. It also brought up the long-standing
dispute on whether the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II was justified, mentioning a new book
on the subject.
“To us, the story was the continuing debate over how these events are remembered and memorialized. Nowhere did the
story state or imply that Japanese-Americans were less than patriotic Americans. Just the opposite, the story had many
Japanese-American voices including that of a former soldier who was wounded during the war.
“The story was justified by the events and debates and was delicately handled by Dawn House, who realized it had the
potential to offend some people and made every effort to be accurate and fair.”
Maybe it was another piece of that conversation playwright Miller outlined — just a nation talking to itself.
