The Grand Rapids Press and Its Published Comments on Immigrants
Remember when the Grand Rapids Press announced it was going to be “tough on trolls”? Supposedly, the Press was going to use a three-pronged attack to remove racist, homophobic, and defamatory commentary on its MLive website. First, the reporter who wrote the article was supposed to review it and remove posts that violated the MLive terms of use for comments. Second, the Press hired a “sweep team” that was going to do searches of their articles for red-flag words that indicated racism, sexist comments, homophobic hate speech, and defamation. Third, readers could report individual comments for violations.
This much-touted policy might leave readers with the impression that anything left on the site was there with the approval of the Grand Rapids Press. If that were the case, then comments which are supposedly reviewed twice by people paid by the newspaper and which are still online must be there because the Press sees nothing wrong with them….right?
If so, this places the Press in seeming support of some pretty interesting opinions. Take a look at an article covering a presentation by distinguished author and professor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, founder of the Harvard Immigration Project. Some of the commentary left after this article—in other words, passing the approval of both the “sweep team” and reporter Garret Ellison—offers extreme suggestions about immigrants. Here’s a small selection:
1. It’s OK to shoot undocumented immigrants when they are found in the United States.
Quite frankly, we don’t want any new citizens. If there here illegally, ship them home or shoot them.
2. It’s OK to use a White Supremacist website as a preferred source for information on immigration in the States. This site, the name of which I’ve blanked out in the quote, has been cited as a hate group by the Poverty Law Center.
Good internet sites [sic; he only cites one] with the truth about immigration are. http://www.xxxxx.xxx. read what the real costs are to our schools , hospitals, prison system and your freedom.
3. Having a child in the United States if you are not a citizen or a documented worker is a criminal act.
I don’t care if they had a child here, that was the commission of fraud. They had no right to come to this country and everything they did was a crime because of their illegal status.
4. It’s OK to present as facts the false claims that no undocumented immigrants are paying taxes or Social Security (they are); all collect welfare (they are unable to do so—only citizens can collect welfare); and that they supplement their illegal wages via drug dealing and theft.
They work, get paid under the table,(no social security No. means no legal job) and collect welfare at the same time. So they pay no taxes, take jobs, take our tax dollars, and then send the money home to Juan. How great is that? Plus they deal drugs and steal on the side if necessary.
5. It’s journalistically sound to use a debunked quote by a Latino leader as if were true—and then, in a move worthy of the Darwin Awards, use the very website that shows how these and other fictitious quotes by Gutierrez were circulated in racist emails as “proof” that he said it.
Jose Angel Gutierrez, professor, University of Texas, Arlington; founder of La Raza Unida political party; and beneficiary of American generosity: “We have an aging white America. . . . They are dying. . . . !” “We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him. http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/hispanicleaders.asp scroll down
6. We should murder any immigrants that attempt to cross our borders, because they are not human beings but “vermin.”
They are a vermin that eats away the the fabric of the american way of life. They want nothing but a free ride. Mine the border. Stop this madness of thinking they contribute to this country in any usefull way except tucking in a bed sheet in a motel or picking an apple.
This is only a small sampling of what the Press presents on its website on any given day. Press staff and paid contract workers have allowed remarks like these to remain “published” (that is, made available to the public) at the paper’s expense and under the proud banner of the Grand Rapids Press.
As a side note: I did not bother to contact Press diva and non-stop Tweeter Garret Ellison; he has taken even requests by various readers to fix typos in his headlines and incorrect names in his articles as personal insults. I did report each of these racist comments, and about two dozen more on various articles, to the so-called sweep team. As of this writing, all comments still remain on the site. I also emailed the above comments and a few more to Press Editor Paul Keep and Online Editor Meegan Holland to make them aware of the remarks. If the comments are removed after this point, it will be because of my unpaid time in reporting them, not due to any Press staff or contractors.
Visitors to the site tend to read articles on the same day they’re posted. These remarks have gotten five days’ worth of viewing by the Press readership…because no one at the Press seemed to have found anything wrong with them.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 
Good analysis. Our paper the Lansing State Journal lets a lot of this stuff stay on as well. They know that when they let crackpots put up comments like this, it brings more eyes to the ads. They don’t really care about cleaning up the comments; they just want lots and lots of online arguments to bring more hits to the site. They should be ashamed.
Thanks for your thougts, Peter. I too have wondered whether there’s a commercial interest behind leaving such vicious commentary online. The one big difference between the Journal and the Grand Rapids Press, though, is that the Press really publicized how they were going to clean up their site and enforce the MLive user agreement terms. And here’s just a little sampling of the so-called results.
So – would the Press argument be that this is freedom of speech? And that it’s up to the reader to do his/her research (as you showed via snopes?) as to whether something is true or not. I’m suspecting that several GR Press reporters don’t look much further than their own noses for the facts of the matter so why would they want to take the time to do so with MLive?
1. Sondra, you can look up that link if you don’t believe what I wrote; it was part of the post and since it was a link to a credible source, I left it in. If you google the statement in quote marks, you’ll come up with a lot of Neo Nazi/White Supremacist sites that post it, but the original coverage (by the hyper-conservative Washington Times) did not include the “kill the gringos” part…as Snopes notes, that was invented and added to the documented comments for a racist e-mail blast.
2. There are several categories of hate speech that are not protected by the First Amendment: speech that defames an individual (such as the Guttierez example, and another comment that I didn’t include that defamed Dr. Suarez-Orozco); words that threaten physical harm or harassment toward an individual, and “fighting words.” Fighting words are statements that advocate violence toward a specific racial or religious group.
I think you’ll find that all of the quotes I chose fall into one unprotected category or another, and therefore under the law they are not “free speech.”
In addition, the journalism standards of most newspapers prohibit the publication of false claims and/or hate speech against groups of people. The posting regulations on the Press site specifically forbid this type of speech along with personal attacks and other comments they consider disruptive to civil discussion.
And if you also think I’m lying about that, here’s the link to their user agreement for the authors of comments: http://www.mlive.com/useragreement/
3. As for writers here not looking further than than their own noses, that’s an insulting and untrue statement. Specific to this topic, I have interviewed the online editor of the Grand Rapids Press three times about this issue over the past year, and have also discussed it via email several times with the editor-in-chief. In addition, I’ve interviewed an attorney I used to work with on the topic of the Press allowing comments that violate their own user agreement to remain online, and what legal liability they are risking by doing so.
On this site, unlike the Press site, we enforce a prohobition against defamation, personal attacks, or hate speech in the commentary, but we do promote discussion. So thanks for your comments.