Correcting Brodesky’s Ethnic Studies column

by David Safier

I wrote this morning mildly praising a column by Josh Brodesky about the Ethnic Studies program. Though I didn't agree with everything in the column, I was pleased to see it in the Star, especially from someone who doesn't have a dog in the hunt. His defense of the Ethnic Studies program could inform some readers and even change some minds.

But it looks like Brodesky got a few things wrong, which speaks of sloppy research and/or sloppy writing. Three Sonorans catches the errors and goes to great lengths to correct them.

The problems are:

Brodesky linked Dolores Huerta's speech at Tucson High where she said "Republicans hate Latinos" with Ethnic Studies, even though the only link is that Huerta is a Hispanic activist who is probably discussed in Ethnic Studies for the important work she has done. That's sloppy on Brodesky's part. The speech was used by Horne and Paton to damn "Hispanic radicals" in general and paint Ethnic Studies with that brush, but that's the point. The "all these Hispanics are alike" stereotype is part of the underlying prejudice minority groups regularly contend with. That's one of many reasons Ethnic Studies is a valuable program, to spotlight and counter those kinds of stereotypes.

Brodesky also misrepresented a follow-up episode. When deputy superintendent Margaret Garcia Dugan came to Tucson High to offer an alternative viewpoint in a speech, according to Three Sonorans, she refused to take questions from students, something Huerta allowed. Some students responded by putting tape across their mouths to show they were being silenced. It wasn't a reaction to Dugan or her talk. It was a reaction to her limiting dialogue and silencing their voices.

Maybe Brodesky's misrepresentations are the result of his summarizing an incident too briefly. If so, that's bad writing, especially since it puts a negative spin on the Ethnic Studies program (in an otherwise positive column) it doesn't deserve. If he simply described the incidents from memory rather than doing the easy research to find out exactly what happened, especially with the mouth taping episode, that's poor journalism. These questions are especially important to me because I accused him of poor journalism in his column on blogging awhile back for similar reasons, and this recent column suggests a pattern.

NOTE: Three Sonorans' post, and this one, represent one of the important services blogs perform: to correct the record. Brodesky was pretty harsh when he wrote about blogs, and I imagine he won't like either of our posts if he reads them (Unlikely unless he has a Google alert on his name, since he was very clear that he doesn't read the blogs he thought he knew enough about to criticize). Really, the media  should read this kind of thing and use it as a caution against writing carelessly and misrepresting the subject they're writing about.