The student paper at the University of Colorado is under the microscope for publishing an opinion piece that offended many.
Extend this to your own campus. Could this happen at the Cardinal or Herald? Has it? If it does, what means should be used to address the issue? Should the editor be fired?
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Student Newspaper in Hot Water
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I feel like this is very similar to the article we read for the Discussion Arena a few weeks ago.
It seems that writers get themselves into trouble with racial satire--that topic is just a little bit too personal for me to be satirized. I think if the writer wants to do satire, they should write about something that obviously comes across as satire. Or at least they should do that until they become a more skilled writer. It seems pretty clear to me that this just came across as racism, and that's something no paper should publish.
I would hope this would never happen here. If it did, however, I think the firing of the editor would depend on the situation.
It is like the article we read.
History repeats itself. God this is soo stupid though.
I think the editor being fired isn't a terrible idea. Which one though, the opinion editor, the EIC, both? Both potentially blew it here. I think the opinion editor should be fired though, it is their section, it is absurd that this would both get to the EIC and through the EIC.
I get the impression this satire is just a B/S defense.
"Oh my god, everyone hates me, no, no, you got it wrong, I'm not racist. I'm a satirist."
As Katy asked, I'm not sure if this would happen at the DC or BH, I'd like to think it wouldn't, but it made me think of another interesting question.
Hypothetically if you were the opinion editor at one of those papers and you had a co-editor and they let this get past on your night off... then what? should they be fired too? It still reflects poorly on you. What is your co-editor doing on your night off?
Can you trust them not to do something this ridiculous?
It would be unfair that your co-editor maybe would do this on your night off, but there are a lot of other checks is place to prevent it. At a student paper that article was probably read by at least 4 or five people other than its desk editor. I guess thats part of what makes this so ridiculous because it isn't like this guy and his EIC just decided, but at least a few copy editors had to have read it and let it go too.
Despite these stories about inappropriate articles, I have seen that system catch offensive articles before they go to print too.
I feel like there must be something else an opinion editor could write about. Granted he does have freedom of speech, but as an editor would it really be that hard to tell him to write about something else? It seems like the ball was dropped and no effort was made to soften or omit an article that was blatantly racist.
It is pretty clear by all the discussion so far that the blame can be placed on several different fronts in this situation. I think that most of the blame has to go to the person who wrote it. He came up with the idea. I see it as similar to the Asian Weekly article because I don't think it was a satire because they aren't letting the author of the article talk about it.
Post a Comment