J Street Conference: How and why I disagree with what I said earlier

The J Street Conference, a weekend-long affair from which myself and New Voices Editor Ben Sales have just returned, was an odd experience for me.

On the one hand, my personal politics bring me to sympathize with J Street. On the other hand, I usually don’t know what to think about specific issues within the larger Israel-Palestine debate because it’s not a primary issue of mine and I don’t do as much reading about as I do about other things. So I often feel unprepared to know what I think about Israel-Palestine issues.

And on the third hand, I was there not only to blog in this opinionated fashion, but to do some more standard objective reporting on college students and J Street U and that sort of thing. So, despite my urge to sympathize with J Street, I had my journalist cap on, which has the distinct effect of making me slightly more skeptical of everything than I otherwise am.

One result of that was my much-discussed (or is that over-discussed?) post on Sunday, J Street Conference: Lots of college students: no press allowed.

After posting it, I had a number of interesting conversations with J Street U staffers, J Street U students, other members of the press and a smattering of other conference attendees. The consensus among virtually everyone that spoke with me about it–except for me–seemed to be that I had lost my mind. By the end of Monday–yesterday, the day after I wrote the post–I was inclined to agree, not that I was out of my mind, but that I had been wrong. However, I agree that I was wrong for reasons different from everyone else.

So I’ll lay out again the bare bones of what my argument was and what the arguments against me were and then I’ll give you the reason I’m now contradicting myself.

My argument was this:

1. There are lots of students here and J Street sees that as a selling point and proof that what they are doing is working.
2. Therefore, J Street should want to encourage the press to spend as much time around those students as possible.
3. Therefore, it makes no sense that the only session that was designated as specifically for students–in fact, it was mandatory for them to attend so they could receive their travel stipends, or something like that–was closed to the press.
4. Therefore, I proclaimed that the access of the press to the students at the conference was being stupidly limited.

Here are the wrong reason that others gave for my being wrong:

• Students shouldn’t be on the record in college because college is a time for experimentation.

Wrong. Both as a college student and as a campus journalist who has been threatened with lawsuits for just this reason, I see no merit in the notion that people who are legally adult should be given a four year pass on personal responsibility and accountability. While it’s bad when mistakes made when people are young come back to bite them in the ass later, this is just an unfortunate potential consequence of being responsible adults in a free society. Unless there’s something good about prolonged adolescence and we want to treat college students as children. I certainly don’t want that.

• I’ve already been given a free pass to attend the conference as a member of the press and now I’m complaining that my free pass doesn’t give me access to everything that the people who paid get.

This wrongly assumes that I would have come anyway and that I just want everything for free, but I would not have come anyway. It also assumes that I’m only in this racket for all the free stuff and great perks. I don’t think I need to explain why that’s an odd notion. I was at the conference not just as a member of the press, but to report on what was going on with college students at the conference. Clearly, J Street believes my presence and pursuit of this task to be beneficial to them. Otherwise, they would not have approved my press pass. If that’s the case, why would they want to restrict my access to the very thing that I’m there to cover?

• The press has plenty of access to students. In fact, they’ve been interviewing students in droves all over the place.

I don’t disagree with the fact that we had lots of access to students and that we were interviewing lots of them. But this fact does not mean that access to them when they’re together as a group should be restricted. If access to them when they’re together should be restricted, argue for it on its own merits, rather than arguing for it by saying that there are other times/ways to hear from them.

• Students should get a free and open space to talk about student issues without the intrusion of the press.

This one I buy now, but didn’t initially, as opposed to the three reasons above which I didn’t buy then and still don’t.

I finally talked with J Street U Director Daniel May about it. And he cited one or two of the above reasons, but then he said something to actually worked. He said that J Street U has initiative under development that aren’t ready to be made public yet and that those would part of the discussion in the closed student session. So that makes sense.

Thanks to everyone who patiently argued this out with me over the las couple days.