At Ohio State University the decision-making process was complex. The Lantern’s advertising policy is in the hands of a publications committee comprising faculty, students, editorial board members, and the paper’s business manager.{44} University policy requires committee approval before acceptance of an ad designating a religious group. The committee voiced five to four to reject CODOH’s submission.{45} But the story did not end there. Enjoined by the committee’s decision from running the ad, the Lantern’s editor, Samantha G. Haney, used her editorial powers to run it as an op-ed piece, explaining that the paper had an “obligation” to do so.{46} This decision gave Smith added legitimacy and saved him the $1,134 it would have cost to place a full-page ad in the paper.{47}
A lengthy editorial explaining the Lantern’s decision condemned Bradley Smith and his cohorts as “racists, pure and simple” and the ad as “little more than a commercial for hatred.” Nonetheless the newspaper had to publish it because it could not only “run things that were harmless to everyone.”{48} Haney and her staff rejected the suggestion that they turn to the Ohio State History Department to “pick apart” the ad fact by fact. That, they explained, might suggest that the ad had some “relevancy” and some “substance,” which they were convinced it did not. Given that one of the rationales the Lantern offered for publishing the article was that “truth will always outshine any lie,” its refusal to ask professional historians to elucidate how the ad convoluted historical fact seemed self-defeating.{49} It seemed to reflect an understandable reluctance to accord denial legitimacy. There is no better example of the fragility of reason than the conclusion by these editorial boards that it was their obligation to run an ad or an op-ed column that, according to their own evaluation, was totally lacking in relevance or substance.
In contrast to the position adopted by James Duderstadt at the University of Michigan, Ohio State’s president, Gordon Gee, attacked the decision to give Smith space in the newspaper, declaring the deniers’ arguments “pernicious” and “cleverly disguised” propaganda that enhanced prejudice and distorted history.{50}
When this issue was being debated at Ohio State, a CBS reporter came to that campus to film a segment on Holocaust denial for a network show on hatred and extremism in the United States. Alerted in advance to the pending controversy, the cameras were conveniently present when the editor received a call from Smith congratulating her for running the ad and standing up for the principles of free speech and free press. When Haney hung up, the television reporter, who was standing nearby, asked how she felt. She turned and somewhat plaintively observed that she thought she had been had.
Not all the papers subscribed to the First Amendment argument; indeed, some explicitly rejected it. The University of Tennessee’s Daily Beacon dismissed the idea that not running the ad harmed the deniers’ interests: It was not “censorship or even damaging.”{51} Pennsylvania State University’s Daily Collegian, which had been one of the first to receive an ad from Smith, denied that the issue was one of free speech. After seeing student leaders and numerous individuals on campus inundated with material by deniers, the paper reasoned that those behind the ad had sufficient funds to propagate their conspiracy theory of Jewish control without being granted space in the paper.{52}
In an eloquent editorial the Harvard Crimson repudiated Smith’s claim to a free-speech right to publish his ad. To give CODOH a forum so that it could “promulgate malicious falsehoods” under the guise of open debate constituted an “abdication” of the paper’s editorial responsibility.{53} The University of Chicago Maroon agreed that while the deniers “may express their views,” it had “no obligation at anytime to print their offensive hatred.”{54}
The argument that not publishing the ad constituted censorship was not only a misinterpretation of the First Amendment but disingenuous. The editorial boards that reached this decision ignored the fact that they all had policies that prevented them from running racist, sexist, prejudicial, or religiously offensive ads. (Some of the papers in question even refuse cigarette ads.) How could they square their “principled” stand for absolute freedom of speech with policies that prevented them from publishing a range of ads and articles? Why was Bradley Smith entitled to constitutional protection while an ad for an X-rated movie, Playboy, the KKK, or Marlboros was not? Recognizing this inconsistency, some of the boards tried to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory positions by adopting a stance that drew them even further into the deniers’ trap. They argued that Holocaust denial was not antisemitic and therefore not offensive. The Cornell Daily Sun editorial board determined that the “ad does not directly contain racist statements about Jewish people.”{55} Valerie Nicolette, the Sun’s managing editor, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the editors had evaluated the ad based on their standards of “obscenity and racism” and decided that it passed.{56} When a group of Jewish students at Duke met with the editorial board of the Duke Chronicle to protest the running of the ad, they were told that the paper’s policy was not to run any ad that was “racist or contained ethnic slurs” but that this ad did not fall into that category.{57}
Andrew Gottesman, who vigorously argued that he could not condone “censorship” of Smith’s advertisement and whose Michigan Daily published its ringing denunciation of Holocaust denial under Justice Hugo Black’s interpretation of the First Amendment, admitted that there were ads he would not run in the paper. This ad, however, did not deserve to be “banned from the marketplace of ideas, like others might be.” Among those he would ban were a Ku Klux Klan announcement of lynching or a beer ad with a woman holding a beer bottle between her breasts.{58} For Gottesman keeping such sexist and racist ads out of the paper would not constitute censorship; keeping Smith’s out would. When Washington University’s Student Life published the ad, an editorial explained that it did so in the interest of preventing “freedom of ideas from disappearing from its newspapers.”{59} Yet the same paper includes the following policy statement on its advertising rate card: “Student Life reserves the right to edit or reject any advertisement which does not comply with the policies or judgment of the newspaper.”{60}