The final issue of the Squelch, internally known as the 'Hate Issue,' got a lot of guff from a surprising-- to Squelchers-- source: a two line throwaway bit in the small text. Here's the PDF link; the offending lines are in the bottom left of the second page.

Berkeley NOW got upset, and the usual internal argument on how to punish the Squelch raged. on one side are the 'Burn them to the ground' types. The other side, which is usually the more experienced crew, typically carries the day.

Their argument, besides the whole Free Speech thing, is that Squelch and other Racist, Mysognist Publications WANT to be protested. We want to be confronted, sent nasty e-mails, and generally get a response of some kind. Then we go back and use that outrage to crank out new material. As one NOW person wrote,

if we protest, it will feed right into their hands, They Want Us to Care, and it will just escalate into another issue with even more jokes at our expense!

Another wrote

If you think what they put in tiny print on the inside of the front cover this time is bad, just wait until the next issue if there is a protest.

How did this argument get so widely accepted? The truth is: Squelch doesn't use 'being protested' for new material. Being protested isn't very funny. Where's the humor in a spat between two campus groups fighting over ASUC funds? There's a simple equation: ASUC = Not Funny. It's not fun for the Squelch people, either. It means getting yelled at on Sproul, dealing with angry ASUC officials threatening to cut funding, and worrying that advertisers will pull out. So when Squelch puts something controversial out, the 'win' situation for us is people understand it as cutting humor and leave it there.

So why are all these groups convinced we win from all this? Possibly because while protesting the Squelch irritates the Squelch, the Protestors invariably end up losing even more. The Free Speech argument almost always wins the fray, even in Berkeley. Even the pissed-off NOW people were swayed significantly by it. One wrote

The ASUC has no right to punish student publications for what they print. Just imagine the furor it would cause if they tried and who would most definitely be on the losing end (not the Squelch). While protesting would be bad, trying to get the ASUC to infringe the Squelch's freedom of speech would be even worse.

At the end of the day, the publications keep their funding, the protesters get a lot of bad publicity with nothing to show for it, and in general get no satisfaction from going after publications. It's easy to understand why they'd conclude that if they lost, then Squelch must've won. But that's not true: everyone lost. Squelch lost time, the Protesters lost respect, and Free Speech suffered another assault.

The exception to this is the Patriot, which has a unique business model dependent on getting their magazines stolen. But that's for another day.Email This Post!