Media Coverage

We furthered the prejudice without even asking twice
Matthew Von Pinnon, Editor, The Forum
Opinion - 04/01/2007

Everybody is prejudiced in one way or another. We’re all shaped by our experiences and surroundings.

It’s natural, to some degree.

But for journalists, it’s dangerous.

We have the power to spread and further prejudices far and wide -- sometimes without even realizing we’re doing it.

An example of that appeared in our paper this past week.

On Tuesday, we wrote about a juror who later, under oath, revealed she helped convict Fargo’s Mevludin Hidanovic of engaging in a riot last summer at the fair because of her past experiences with Bosnians, not because she thought he was guilty.

The juror said she regretted her undue influence on the jury’s decision and wanted to set the record straight.

Fair enough.

But a day later, in a follow-up front-page story on the matter, we described the fight at the fair “between Bosnians and Hispanics.”

Upon seeing that, I asked the reporter why he used that phrase.

He said the fight was described as such in the Cass County sheriff ’s reports. “Mexican Americans” was actually used to describe the second group.

I asked him whether the sheriff ’s reports stated that the officers believed the fight occurred over ethnicity or nationality (Hispanic is an ethnicity; Bosnian and Mexican are nationalities).

He said he didn’t believe so.

I knew the answers to my questions before I asked him, as I had dealt with those same issues with another reporter when the fight at the fair first occurred. I also knew what his next response would be since the earlier reporter raised it as well:
“But the sheriff ’s office described the fight that way,” he said. “We sourced it.”
“But is it fair?” I asked.

If the fight didn’t occur over ethnicity or nationality -- and nobody could prove that it did -- why are we furthering that prejudice?

For all we know, the two groups of people fighting that night were upset over who was first in line at the Tilt-A-Whirl.

The sheriff ’s officer probably didn’t think twice about describing the two groups as Bosnian or Mexican American. Perhaps the two groups were even defined by their ethnicity or nationality, but is it right to describe them that way when it has nothing to do with their guilt or innocence?

We don’t say an Irishman and a Frenchman got into a fight last night at the bar, especially if they’ve been living among us for years. We wouldn’t think of describing it that way because most of us no longer hold those old prejudices that the Irish are all fighters and the French are all mad.

In fact, when we began writing about last summer’s fight at the fair, I got a few calls from people angry that we didn’t describe the two parties as “Bosnian and Mexican,” as other media outlets did. We were accused of “whitewashing the truth” or “buckling to a politically correct world.” See, it was explained to me that Bosnians and Mexicans are hotheads and, of course, they were fighting over cultural differences. Maybe, I said, but nobody has established that, and until they do, we’re not furthering that stereotype in our paper. So I’m a little embarrassed that we let that prejudice -- even if it wasn’t ours in the first place -- sneak into last week’s paper. That nobody called in anger to complain that we unfairly furthered it to the masses saddens me even more.

Von Pinnon is editor of The Forum. Reach him at (701) 241-5579 or mvonpinnon@forumcomm.com