Is That Legal?

I spoke to Steven Glass yesterday*, and he couldn't see anything wrong with either of their actions.

I'm not sure how serious the original offense was, since the quotes are admittedly accurate, but were allegedly used out of context. In a new story, that's a mortal sin; in an opinion piece, it's just venereal.

Given that the previous column by Ms. Bandes was a variant of "sororities are stupid" column #94, with the usual flood of "we are, like, totally not stupid" complaints, the real reason for dropping the column is probably the editor getting sick of the hassle. He would have been a lot better off carpeting her in private and offering the complainants editorial space to respond. At least he's learning now, rather than after becoming editor of the Times.

Simon

* Who ya gonna believe, me or him?

Eric, I don't agree with your #3 bottom line assertion. Chris was quite clear as to the reasons for firing her and I believe him.

If DTH hopes to have itself taken seriously it must safeguard customary journalistic practices. To expect less is to relegate it to just another campus rag.

a column is different than a op-ed page.

one is the priviledge of being regularly published, the other is part of the right to be heard.

if they prohibited her from ever being accepted as a contributor, i'd say they'd gone too far.

A venereal sin? This is the best malapropism I've seen all week.

I took "venereal sin" to be intentional.

Intentional or not, it's great.

Eric is completely right on this one. The way to safeguard the DTH's journalistic reputation is not to get into the "freedom of speech" debate, to error on the side of liberty, and to handle such things in precisely the way Eric suggests. The editor instead handed conservatives a baseball bat, and they already have plenty. It's gotten so that young conservatives, in particular, appear to think they are oppressed and actually have a constitutional right to applause. That's why, when I am forced to stomp a mudhole in them, verbally, of course, I always make clear that they had every right to say what they said. OF COURSE, I support their right to be mean, ill-informed guttersnipes in public, but that I am now using my own freedom of speech to drop-kick them into public disdain. The relatively powerless, and those who care about them, do not lose in a free-speech environment, because the powerful always have their say, even in a much more confined arena of speech, like the one this young editor is helping to build.

And anyone who thinks that using someone's actual quote--out of context--on the op-ed page is not fairly common journalistic practice has not been deeply engaged in the battle for the public mind. It's definitely a "venereal" sin, and one that comes out in the wash of public discourse.

Venereal six. What is it?

In the column, she quotes three people of Arab ancestry whom she intereviewed. She quotes all of them as supporting racial profiling.