The editor-in-chief of a college newspaper in Tennessee resigned over the way he felt the paper's leadership responded to campus anger over an Israel-related story he wrote following the October 7 terrorist attack.
Matthew Giffin, the former editor-in-chief of the Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) school paper, Sidelines, spoke with Fox News Digital about his decision to resign from his position and the implications that stories like his have on free speech on college campuses across the country, even in deep-red Tennessee.
"I was very animated," he said. "By all the images that I and bunch of others saw from what happened on October 7th in Israel, when Hamas originally attacked and all these people were killed in this horrific, horrific thing that was like, you know, proportionally worse than the 911, if I remember the numbers."
Because there was a lot of discussion about Hamas' terror attack on Israel that left 1,200 Israelis dead and resulted in the capture of over 240 civilians taken to Gaza, Giffin decided it was important to cover the story in the MTSU student paper.
Giffin first shared his experience in an op-ed for The College Fix, where he explained he was animated by what he saw on Oct. 7, so he wrote a story profiling an MTSU student who was worried about friends he had in Tel Aviv. But, after backlash to the story ensued and the response he got from his peers and the paper's advisors, he resigned from the paper because he was "unable to stand behind a dishonest and harmful representation" of his story.
After his article was posted to Instagram, anger and criticism ensued in the public comment section.
"I knew there was going to be a little bit of controversy," he said. "I didn't know it was going to be nearly the amount of backlash that we got. It was more comments than I'd ever seen on an Instagram post that we've done for our newspaper."
Giffin took the article down after the student who was featured asked him to, fearing for his safety due to the nature of the comments and because he had had his employer singled out. Then, he met with editors and the Sideline's faculty advisor about a statement they wanted to draft in response to the piece and the reaction it garnered.
"But the statement that ended up coming out of that meeting kind of threw me under the bus," he said. "It said that I failed to report on a casualty count, a Palestinian casualty count… that wasn't relevant to the story that I was trying to tell… it was about this guy who had a particular experience and particular worries and anxieties about what was going on."
"The numbers that I was told that I needed to put in my article in that meeting, was from a source that was under the purview of Hamas," he added. "So I find it a bit morally irresponsible to be going around talking about these numbers as if they're fact, when it's been demonstrated that these sources are not trustworthy."
After they put out the statement that said, "In retrospect, Sidelines failed to report on the casualties the Palestinian people have suffered and focused only on damage done to the Israeli population," Giffin resigned because he said it wasn't something he could stand behind as he felt his reporting was adequate given what he was covering.
"There was no failure of reporting, so I couldn't stand behind that," he told Fox News Digital. "I felt like that was something that people needed to be made aware of, that antisemitic attitudes and the amount of dissent that people voiced in that comment section of that Instagram post, that has influence even at places like Middle Tennessee State University that are public four-year colleges in deep red states."
"It's not just at the Harvards and the Yales," he added. "It is right here in conservative states, which should be a wake-up call to a lot of people, I think."
Giffin said people who are on the side of "baseline morality" should be able to say that "a terrorist group going in and killing a bunch of civilians out of nowhere is bad."
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"People who hold those opinions, we need to get loud, and we need to be a bit more intentional about the fact that this is wrong," he said. "We need to go, and we need to say that to people and not be afraid to at the risk of offending somebody or hurting somebody's feelings or preconceptions about this conflict that's going on."
"I've been able to talk with all these different outlets about this issue, which is great," he added. "But I think that it's not as socially acceptable to support these causes, not as socially acceptable to be on the side of not wanting civilians to be burned and beheaded and raped and that's a sad thing I think."
Giffin described it as "terrible" that there are so many people reacting negatively to a publication discussing October 7, but he said he is going to keep saying what he thinks is right.
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"I'm going to keep talking about these people's stories and I'm going to keep pointing the blame at people who it needs to be pointed at, which is the terrorists, Hamas," he said. "I just think it's pretty simple, I thought it was simple, but I had to have a wake-up call too apparently."
He concluded by explaining that he doesn't believe his former editors or faculty advisors are antisemitic "in and of themselves."
"I don't think they hold those beliefs, I don't think they do," he said. "I'm not trying to accuse any of those people of hating Jews or wanting war needlessly in the Middle East or anywhere else."
"I think there are a lot of people out there, though, who do have those opinions and do have those attitudes, and the people who share those opinions are the loudest right now, and they have the most influence," he said. "People need to wake up, like I said before, and realize what time it is. We need to speak up about this and say it is not right."
Fox News' Jeffrey Clark contributed to this report.
