If you had been watching me read Anthony Bernier’s “A Case Study Like No Other: Taking the San Jose Challenge”, you would have seen me yelling at the screen, slamming my fists down on the desk, and getting up and having to count to ten. I’ve had a few days to calm down, but this discussion post is a revision of angry notes that I took as I was reading the piece. I am angry at Dan Noyes for being a lazy, irresponsible news journalist out to stupidly exploit the reputation of the King Library for ratings. I am angry at Pete Constant for being a thoughtless and possibly corrupt or opportunistic city councilman who submitted a proposal to the city council that is frankly insulting to librarians and the educated citizens of San Jose. And I hold a little resentment towards the leadership of The King Library that they haven’t fought back harder against this kind of ignorant slander. So I chose to answer Bernier’s questions that he poses at the end of his case study. First though, I’ll give you my angry notes.
As I was reading, the first thing I did was to look at Constant’s proposal. There is a very special feeling that you get when you are reading and you find that your own mind has sprinted ahead and is unknowingly following the same train of thought as that of an author. Anyone who has had this experience will understand my excitement when I found that the very part of Constant’s proposal that made me yell at the screen was the same quote that Bernier cites:
“For a temporary unblock request, the patron should make the request to a library employee, who will refer it to the IT specialist on duty. If the IT specialist determines that the site is appropriate for viewing (i.e. falls outside the appropriate filtering categories) the site will be unblocked for 24 hours.” from Pete Constant’s proposal to the San Jose City Council.
IT specialists are supposed to get to decide what is appropriate or not for people to view??? This is insulting at best and fascist at worst! I’m not saying that IT specialists aren’t proponents of intellectual freedom, in fact I think most IT specialists are. But for an enlightened and intelligent city like San Jose and more importantly a university to reduce a question of intellectual freedom to the level of spam filter (falls outside the appropriate filtering categories?!) is ludicrous and shows just how far Pete Constant is from having any sort of intellectual value system!
Ok, calm down. Let’s think about this. Why are we simply assuming that filtering is the best solution here? Has there even been an attempt to think about other possibilities? Well after reading about all of the work and thought that was put into the Joint Library agreement with the city I find that yes, other possibilities had been considered but Noyes either chose not to report them (possibly to sensationalize the story) or he never did the research himself (a measure of incompetence, in my opinion, for an investigative reporter). And while we are on the topic—why would any investigative reporter worth his or her own salt attack a library that is trying to uphold complete unfettered access to information. Yes, that means that we will have to suffer pornography, hate speech, and other abuses, but the answer to bad speech is good speech not limited speech. But I cringe even to write that because it has been said better by so many for so long that I’m flabbergasted that we are even having this tiresome rerun of a debate which is what made me think about this from an entirely different perspective. Who would gain from the King Library implementing a filtering system?
I want to examine the role that the very influential tech industry in San Jose played in Pete Constant’s proposal. How many companies that write “Filtering Software” are based in San Jose? In reading Marianne Messina’s article in Metroactive, “An Unsexy Truth: Myths and misconceptions in the debate over library filters.” We find that Secure Computing which owns “SmartFilter” the program mentioned by name in the news article does indeed have its corporate headquarters in San Jose. . . 4810 Harwood Road to be exact. Did any tech companies contribute to Constants campaign financing? Which ones? Ok, maybe this is cynical, maybe it is dead on, but my point is instead of asking this question, “At the request of the Council’s Rules Committee, the Library engaged a variety of research steps” (Bernier).
What about the news report? It is very trendy to go into libraries now with hidden cameras to “expose” this. It is absolutely exploitative journalism. If I were the San Jose’s Library director I would want to have a long talk with the ABC 7 News Director and Dan Noyes about what it means to value the Truth. On top of that if Noyes is going to attack Jane Light’s professionalism as a librarian she needs to attack his “professionalism” as a journalist!
“And the Martin Luther King Library has a problem with pornography. They have no rule against viewing photographs or full-screen sex videos from Internet sites, even with children nearby.” (Porn, Sex Crimes At Libraries http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=i_team&id=4808374)
Aside from the fact that the headline and this entire story is trying to sell sleaze and titillation as news, Noyes is passing off opinions as if they were fact—“The Martin Luther King Library has a problem with pornography.” That is an opinion! It’s one thing to get a quote from a citizen saying this; it is sloppy, lazy, and unethical for a journalist to say this themselves in their “investigative reporting.”
And what about the fact that the public library is also the university library which by definition will have very adult and controversial material. “You might recall here that
universities are among the very least likely institution to be challenged for
their collections and services.” (Bernier) Why wasn’t this a part of the news story?? That is very irresponsible journalism! Isn’t the public of San Jose more enlightened than this???
So to finally get to Bernier’s questions, “Have the complex organizational and bureaucratic resources this matter consumed been worth what will likely (though still not determined) amount to no change in library policy or practice? What are the costs of assembling and mounting such a process? How much did this process cost in terms of staff hours to research synthesize, and weigh? How much money did the meetings of the ULB cost in deliberation over the University’s side of the equation (15+ full-time faculty members)? What are the outcomes of these various processes? Who benefits and how are those benefits determined? As new professionals you should respond to these questions.”
Damn right we should respond! I think the library’s response has been too passive. The library director has done research, and investigations, and reported to boards! What about getting the right story out to the people who saw that irresponsible slander against the city’s public library and heart of the university? Instead of worrying with the ULB or even the City Council, the library should be getting the story out to the public, through other news media, through the library itself, though political action.
Anthony Bernier’s claim that “while most of the procedures thus far have been more on the Library’s terms, a more public exposure will likely also now attract and re-activate the interests that support the filtering proposal” shows very little faith in the citizens of San Jose to understand the value of intellectual freedom if given a chance to hear about the issues on an equal basis. Even Tom Sims of the San Jose Police Department doesn’t see this as a grass roots issue: “the push to filter ‘is not City Council putting this forth but a certain organization putting this forth before City Council and their concern is adult pornography.’" I think it is clear here that the problem lies in the possible public perception that came from an irresponsible news story, not with the library. An effort needs to be made to change that public perception. And I don’t believe that it would be that hard a fight. Bernier seems to fear a “silent majority” when he writes, “none of the supporters of the Councilmember’s proposal appeared at the Library Commission meeting? One answer might be that there was very little support for this proposal. But that would be naïve.” I don’t think it is naïve to believe that the majority of San Jose’s citizens are just as intelligent as most librarians and when given the full story will agree to the King Library’s original and current policy. All that is required is clear and visible opposition to this absurdity. Part of that opposition is going to be a critique of the ABC 7 News show. The library should not be intimidated by TV journalists and should ask in competing TV news media serious questions about the reporting that was done.
I’m interested in finding out the statistics behind how much ratings go up for the ABC 7 News show when the word “sex” is used in a story title, or how about simply listing the number of times ABC 7 has had a news story with the word “sex” in it.
I mean come on, as Bernier says, “complex organizational and bureaucratic resources” have been consumed which means that all of that time and money was basically spent not addressing the real problem: public perception after a lazy piece of yellow journalism. Instead of doing what is in our comfort zone, which is staying quiet and doing redundant research to prove what we already know to be true, we should be bringing the fight to Dan Noyes and Pete Constant.
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