Back on September 3, I posted a letter here that I’d sent to Town Topics, a local paper in my hometown of Princeton, New Jersey, asking why the paper hadn’t covered the legal proceedings against the activists who’d been arrested this past April at a Gaza Solidarity event at Princeton University. A staff writer from the paper responded, promising coverage in the future. In the three weeks since then, three issues of Town Topics have come out–September 4th, 11th, and 18th. How well has it delivered?

Town Topics printed some 15 letters in the three issues since I sent my letter, but didn’t print mine. Though it promised coverage of the proceedings against the “defiant trespass” protesters in municipal court, it so far hasn’t done so.

On September 10, a week after I sent my letter, Princeton Municipal Court held a pre-trial hearing on the defiant trespass case, attended by some 125 people. At the hearing, Judge John McCarthy III, a Princeton graduate himself, declined to dismiss the charges against the defendants, ruling that the case would proceed as demanded by the prosecutor, and setting the date for the next hearing as October 1.

The prosecutor, making clear that he had consulted with University counsel on the matter, promised a fair proceeding based on what he described as considerations of deterrence, retributive justice, and humanitarian concerns. It’s not clear what any of this means. Legally speaking, the prosecutor’s promise has neither standing nor meaning, and legalities are the only thing he can be held to, if that. It may sound comforting to know that a prosecutor cares about humanitarian concerns, but it’s not as though if he suddenly stopped caring about them, he’d tell you.

Though covered in The Daily Princetonian and Princeton Alumni Weekly, no mention of any of this found its way into Town Topics.

The university, of course, reiterated (or was depicted as reiterating) that it regarded the protesters’ actions–a one-hour sit-in–as “egregious.” It remains unclear what was “egregious” about it, and naturally, no one has asked. Are sit-ins themselves “egregious,” or was the pro-Palestine one particularly so? In the first case, would the university’s administration have described, say, the Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit Ins of 1960 as “egregious”? If so, why are they so ubiquitously celebrated, even at Princeton? The Greensboro sit ins lasted a lot longer than the pro-Palestine one, and were far more disruptive. If the lunch counter sit-ins weren’t egregious, then why describe the pro-Palestine one that way?*

One relevant item does appear in the Sept 11 issue, an article called, “University Seeks Even-Handed Response As Pro-Palestinian Demonstrators Return.” As the title makes clear, the article frames the issues from the perspective of the university’s administration. The fundamental issue, we’re led to believe, is not that activists are protesting the university’s failure to disclose the nature of its investments in Israeli occupation, apartheid, or genocide, but that the university’s administration feels the need to restore what it regards as “even-handedness” to a campus thrown into disequilibrium by the presence and activities of anti-war protesters. The protesters’ claims, whatever their validity, are in effect treated as mere footnotes or afterthoughts to this supposedly more significant problem.

The article makes pro forma mention of a September 3 campus protest that I happened to attend. It’s not clear whether the paper sent a reporter to cover the event or simply reproduced the reporting on the event done by other outlets; given the cursory nature of the reporting, the first option seems the more likely one. But either way, the effect is the same: either a reporter was sent and failed to do any reporting on the event, or none was sent.

Near the end of the event, Sireen Sawalha, a Princeton resident and co-author of the recently published book My Brother, My Land (Stanford University Press, 2024), gave a short, impassioned speech about what she had seen on a recent trip to Jenin. What she described in the speech was a society in the process of virtual destruction at Israeli hands. The Israeli attacks on Jenin began in earnest in January 2023, some ten months before October 7, and continued during the summer, several months before it. I blogged about it here and here. They continue, in tandem with Israel’s wholesale assaults on the West Bank.

Town Topics says nothing of Sawalha’s talk at the protest: not her presence at the demonstration; not the fact that she’s a Princeton resident who recently visited a war zone; not the publication of her book, its content, or its being reviewed in The New York Times and elsewhere; and not the content of her speech. But Town Topics is not the only guilty party here. No one else reported on Sawalha’s speech, either.

Evidently, the vague, inchoate (frankly confabulated) sense of disequilibrium felt on campus over last spring’s protests is news. Trivial items in the police blotter are news. A reading of banned books is news. A Bach performance is news. The opening of the Democratic Volunteer Organization headquarters on Nassau Street is news. Evan Gershkovich’s release from captivity in Russia is news. Elizabeth Tsurkov’s kidnapping by Shiite militants in Iraq is news. But Sireen Sawalha’s testimony to the destruction of Jenin isn’t news. Because Jenin isn’t news, and neither is its destruction.

If you’ve so far gotten the impression that you know all about the campus anti-war movement–you read the papers and watch the news, after all–you might want to ask yourself what it is you think you know and how. If you’re not at the relevant events, you can’t know what hasn’t been reported–indeed, can’t know that it hasn’t been reported. Frankly, much of the time, you can’t rightly be said to know what has been reported. And in truth, neither can the reporters. If the best you can say is that you trust reporters to get it right, you might want to ask yourself what that trust is based on. They can’t get right what they aren’t trying to report at all.

At a certain point, it becomes appropriate to ask questions about the bad faith of the journalists promising to cover these events. It may not be appropriate quite yet. But it’s appropriate enough to wonder when “yet” will be.

*As proof that some things never change, consider Princeton’s response within Princeton itself to the sit-ins of the civil rights movement. (I corrected an earlier version of this sentence that implied that the Woolworth’s in Princeton was segregated.)

The movement to desegregate the South arrived in Princeton on a winter weekend in 1960. On March 12, some 50 undergraduates picketed the Woolworth store on Nassau Street to protest the racial segregation of the five-and-ten chain’s Southern lunch counters. For Malcolm L. Diamond, an assistant professor of religion who joined the picketers, this was “an expression of sympathy and concern for those young Negro men and women in the South who are displaying extraordinary courage and discipline in asserting their human rights.” But others, including the editors of The Daily Princetonian, felt that “there just must be a better way for sincerity to be expressed than in the way it was done Saturday.”

I’d love to get a straight answer out of Christopher Eisgruber, Rochelle Calhoun, or Keith Whittington: if the undergraduates described above had staged a sit-in in at the Woolworth’s on Nassau, would Eisgruber, Calhoun, or Whittington have called the police on them, had them arrested, and insisted on their prosecution to the full extent of the law? That’s the impression they’ve so far given us. But if so, that’s the kind of thing the public deserves to know about them.

(Title re-named. Original title: “Defiant Trespass, Compliant Reporting.)