Do Journalists Name People Guilty of Misconduct?

Marquette has loudly claimed that we should not have published the name of Cheryl Abbate, whom we reported told an undergraduate who wanted to oppose gay marriage in her class:

• “some opinions are not appropriate, such as racist opinions, sexist opinions”
•  “do you know if anyone in your class is homosexual?” . . . “don’t you think it would be offensive to them”
• “you don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments.” 
• “In this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.”

Marquette also upped the ante, claiming that we “linked to Abbate’s contact information.” That was flatly untrue.

But the claim that we should not have named Abbate is a bit odd, since journalists normally name the person on whose misconduct they are reporting.

Example: this last June 19, a Congressional intern shouted an obscenity at President Trump while he was walking through the Capitol Rotunda.

Interns are typically college students (as opposed to Abbate, who was 27 years old), and they don’t have any authority over anybody (unlike Abbate, who was Instructor of Record in her class).

But the profane intern has been identified in every story we can immediately find on the incident.

A Google News search for “Caitlin Marriott” tells the story.

Of course, somebody reading this post weeks or months in the future might not get the same Google result, so here is the Google search, as it exists right now, archived.

Marquette is attacking us for doing what journalists normally do.

The Dirty Little Secret

The dirty little secret here is that most of the people attacking us for naming Abbate simply don’t think she did anything wrong. They fully believe that opposition to gay marriage is “hate speech” and should be suppressed. They, quite simply, don’t think we should have exposed Abbate’s misconduct, because they don’t think it was misconduct.

That’s the reality of academia today.