Grow a Thick Skin, or Get Out

"Each new media development has served as a mirror for the society that spawned it. It sure seems time for a good, hard look."   -Jim Rutenberg 

As a journalism student, one of the first things you are told is to grow a thick skin. Your work is constantly being criticized on multiple levels, for multiple things.

I've worked at The Vista, at UCO, for 2.5 years now and have written multiple editorials. My colleagues have as well, and have received a lot of feedback.

There is this saying we have in the newsroom about writing editorials: "If you aren't making someone feel a certain way, whether it's pissing them off or making them happy, you're doing it wrong."

I tried to keep this in mind for my past editorial I wrote, which was very similar to my Stand for Patriotism, Kneel for Liberty blog post. I wrote what I thought, and toned it for the paper, and hoped to get some feedback.

Lo and behold, I get a comment online on it, saying that I am oppressing others with dissenting opinions. Fantastic. I loved that someone took the time to read it, and felt so strongly about what I wrote, that they took the time to leave a comment when they could have read it, and then moved on and done nothing.

I later received another comment that said I should be punished for what I wrote and also said:

"...stand [sic] for what you believe in we don’t need this editor to tell us how to think we could watch cnn [sic] for that."

There were a couple of profanities sprinkled in there, so we deleted the comment, otherwise it would have been posted. But this got me thinking, how much of a thick skin do we, as journalists, need to have?

My co-worker, Sports Editor A. Suave Francisco, wrote a column over the same topic as well. Instead of a comment or two, someone got ahold of his SnapChat account info, and sent him multiple snaps calling him racial slurs and derogatory terms, and I believe he was also told to go die.

All for having a different opinion.

I noted this interesting trend to my professor and he recommended an article to me from the New York Times, titled Hate Speech Bounded by Character Limit Alone. It was an interesting read, written by a Jewish man, Jim Rutenberg, who was attacked multiple times on Twitter because of what he wrote.

He said:

"...I don't know what it's like to be really savaged by Twitter. No one has threatened to rape me or kill me (unless being told to kill myself counts)..."

He goes on to say how he has been told he soils his pants worrying over a Trump presidency, and that he's a "dumbass," as it was so eloquently put by one of his adoring fans.

As writers, how do we grow a thick skin to protect us from the anti-Semitic, racist, and sometimes uneducated responses we get to our articles? Was it like this before social media?

I know I'm not getting death threats or anything like that, but what does being hateful to a writer accomplish? Do people think hurtful words will get them to stop writing?

Internet anonymity is the driving force behind hateful comments to someone with a differing opinion. Hide behind a fake account and your keyboard, and drop a meaningless post about how much that person sucks for not liking strawberries, or something simple like that— then go about your day.

This isn't going to stop as technology progresses; it will probably get worse. Perhaps journalists will have to keep growing thicker and thicker skin, or simply get out, if they don't like how many more people are exposed to their work.

Sincerely,

                               A Pondering Pen