Students criticized for running anti-Semitic ad

Andrew Glazer

ORANGE COAST COLLEGE -- After being lashed with criticism by local Jewish

groups for printing a paid advertisement that said the Holocaust never

happened, the staff of a campus weekly said they learned a valuable

albeit painful lesson.

But the Coast Report’s co-editors -- David Song, 23, and Kimiko Martinez,

22 -- said they don’t regret running the ad.

Advertising for the newspaper is typically handled by advertising

director Mary Quinn. But Quinn deferred the decision to run the ad to the

editorial staff after anticipating that it might generate controversy.

“They didn’t make the decision lightly,” said Cathy Werblin, faculty

advisor of the Coast Report, a weekly publication staffed by nearly 20

journalism students. “I had too many personal issues to make the decision

on my own. We had a lot of in-depth, intellectual, and sometimes

emotional discussion about free speech.”

Werblin, who is Jewish, said she held two-hour-long discussions and many

informal debates with her class before they decided to run the

inflammatory ad.

The advertisement, placed by Bradley R. Smith, director of the Committee

for Open Debate on the Holocaust, ran once in the Feb. 2 edition of the

paper.

Smith has placed similar advertisements in more than 300 campus

newspapers, according to his Web site. Many colleges, he said, have

refused to print his ads. E-mail messages to Smith went unanswered.

Nearly two weeks after Smith’s notice ran, Joyce Greenspan -- the

director of the Costa Mesa-based Anti-Defamation League of Orange

County-Long Beach regional office -- chastised Song over the telephone.

“It sounded like he didn’t know the issues surrounding free press,”

Greenspan said. “I would hope that if they had questions about the

advertisement, they would have brought someone in with the background and

knowledge to help with decisions. Like a history professor.”

Greenspan said the ad was openly offensive and is an attempt by Smith to

“intellectualize anti-Semitism.”

“She was a bit confrontational,” said Song, who said Greenspan had not

identified herself on the telephone.

Song said he was somewhat surprised by the call, which came two weeks

after the ad ran. The text-heavy advertisement failed to rile OCC

students.

“I think people on campus read and rejected it,” he said.

“There was no response because people said ‘what a crock,”’ said Werblin,

whose shoulders slumped in exasperation.

Last week, Werblin invited Stan Brin, editor of the biweekly newspaper,

The Orange County Jewish Heritage, to speak to her class.

Brin, soon after Greenspan’s call, wrote a letter to OCC President

Margaret Gratton, criticizing the paper for running the ad.

“I told them the First Amendment isn’t a great free-for-all,” said Brin,

who lives in Aliso Viejo. “The only ones who really have freedom of the

press, for good and for evil, are those who own one.”

Gratton, who said she was out of town most of last month, sent letters

Wednesday afternoon to Brin and Greenspan.

She wrote that the experience helped the students “understand the

far-reaching impact on the community when insensitive pieces are

printed.”

Gratton said it was not her place to comment on whether the students

should have run the advertisement. But she said she respected how the

students arrived at their decision.

“They have an excellent advisor, who happens to be Jewish, who had

several meetings with student editorial staff,” Gratton said. “We respect

their right as student journalists to work through process. This was an

incredible learning process about the responsibility of the media.”

Werblin added there is no way to predict if the Coast Report would print

another ad from Smith.

“We’d look at it and discuss the ad with the staff as thoroughly as we

did the first time,” she said.