Not long ago, a large envelope landed on my desk. Inside was a copy of our May issue, returned to me from a reader who said he was so infuriated with what he found inside that he couldn’t even drop the magazine into his office trash can; instead, he wanted me to know he was a longtime subscriber canceling his subscription.
What triggered this rebuke was a full-page ad from the Federation for American Immigration Reform attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center. Noting SPLC’s widely reported leadership troubles, FAIR took out the ad to urge philanthropists, journalists, and others to stop relying on the center’s oft-cited list of hate groups, of which FAIR is one.
That subscriber wasn’t the only one who wanted to know why we had accepted the ad. Concerns were raised across the ideological spectrum. Another subscriber wrote in anger when he saw a long letter to the editor from Heidi Beirich, intelligence project director at SPLC, addressing the issues FAIR had raised in the ad. Why he wondered, had the Chronicle charged FAIR to run its views — and not SPLC?
I’m eager to answer those questions so you can understand not only how we make decisions about the news we publish but also about the ads we run. While our business team operates separately from our newsroom, editors do get involved in making decisions about ads that might raise questions from our readers. After all, advertisements need to meet the same legal standards as our reported articles — anything false or libelous can land a news organization in court. As a practical matter, the magazine is one package, and it’s my job to make sure all the parts meet Chronicle standards.
Because we knew publishing the advertisement would be contentious, I consulted many of my colleagues, including company president and editor in chief Michael Riley, and publisher Michael Sisk. We asked ourselves difficult questions about whether the ad conformed to our organization’s values and what it meant for the Chronicle to wade into the debate about hate groups.
We had already grappled with that question when we conducted an analysis of how many groups on the SPLC list had charity status, and we were aware that these days the stakes are even higher, especially in the wake of shootings and fires at synagogues, black churches, and mosques. Those concerns were so high that a few weeks before I knew anything about the FAIR ad, I had asked Sharon Alpert, head of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, to write an opinion article about how philanthropy should respond to the rise of hate crimes and hate groups.
After reflecting on all the controversial issues at hand, we decided to go ahead and publish Alpert’s article — and the FAIR ad — in our May issue. And we were eager to let SPLC respond in our letters section in the June issue so it could answer the charges made by FAIR, which also purchased a second ad in that same edition. After all, that is the same value we uphold in our news pages — everyone gets a chance to weigh in when we publish statements that challenge a nonprofit’s reputation or positions.
While we knew many readers would question our decisions, we believed far more of our subscribers would be let down if we abandoned a central part of our mission: Publishing critiques of how nonprofits operate and provoking robust debates about how all organizations can better advance crucial missions to serve society. Open and unfettered debate is central to our work, whether it involves the journalism we pursue, the opinion articles we publish, or the advertisements we accept.
I hope you’ll let me know when you have any questions about our standards, practices, or operations, and I’ll answer them candidly.
— Stacy Palmer, Editor
