The Stentor responds: A journalistic dilemma
Issue date: 4/24/08 Section: Opinion
The Editorial Board of The Stentor must respond to Feride Yalav's letter to the editor accusing this paper of, among other things, censorship and an anti-Palestinian bias.
Yalav decided to cover [NAME REMOVED]'s presentation on life in Palestine. Rather than reporting on the speaker, Yalav wrote an article about the Palestinian conflict using [NAME REMOVED]'s statements as fact, including those that were not strictly based on [NAME REMOVED]'s experiences. News articles must be thoroughly fact-checked and utilize more than one source, especially on an issue so multi-dimensional and controversial as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using one person's experience to represent objective fact is not something The Stentor can publish.
In the article, Yalav said that [NAME REMOVED] "spoke about the reality of the conflict often misconstrued by the western media," without any support for the alleged misrepresentation of the issue. This clause implies that whenever she ends a statement with, "according to [NAME REMOVED]," the reader is implored to believe that what [NAME REMOVED] states is true, not anything the reader may have heard from other western media outlets.
Yalav was given a week to further report, rework and resubmit the piece. The Editorial Board suggested that she find additional sources and present the other side of the story, as well as find a source for the serious charges she was levying in her article. We decided that a week would be sufficient to find sources, especially given the many resources in our school's faculty. Nevertheless, Yalav failed to find other sources, except for one professor whose comment was appended to the end of the article with no further comment and merely served to reinforce Yalav's views.
Finally, The Stentor allowed Yalav the opportunity to run the article as an opinion piece. Yalav refused, and instead submitted the letter to the editor printed above.
The Stentor does not focus on global issues- we are a college newspaper, and we focus on college and local issues. When we do occasionally run global-focus stories, we ensure that there is a local angle. While Yalav's article did indeed focus on an event at the College, we still must apply universal journalistic standards regarding factual accuracy. An article taking the opposite stance-that of Israel-and supporting its arguments as poorly as Yalav's did would have run into the same criticism and ultimate rejection from The Stentor staff.
Yalav demonstrated her bias when she said in an e-mail to The Stentor staff, "Here is the article about the Palestine presentation from Thursday night as well as a picture and a map which the presenter and I want to include with the article in The Stentor. Please send me the edited final version before it's published, this article means a lot to me." This is not a case of a journalist attempting to write an unbiased piece of news, but of an editorialist trying to present one side of an extremely complex issue without sufficient factual evidence.
On a closing note, we must address Yalav's thinly-veiled criticism of our columnist Mary Volk and our contributor Jared Fox. Volk's and Fox's columns both appear on the opinions page, and both focus on personal issues (and both are quite popular); they are not held to the same journalistic standards as a news story regarding a century-long conflict because they explicitly represent one opinion. Yalav herself wrote an opinion article last week deriding the appearance of panties in bathrooms and on students' rear ends, This seems to fit the category of entertainment more than any other, the same type of entertainment Yalav criticizes people for enjoying.
The Stentor does its very best every week to put out a quality newspaper. We do not censor free speech, and we make every reasonable effort to accommodate a plethora of issues and views. That being said, we must hold our news articles up to rigorous journalistic standards- standards which Yalav's article failed to meet.
The name of the speaker, as well as the original article, were removed from the website at the request of the original author. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Yalav decided to cover [NAME REMOVED]'s presentation on life in Palestine. Rather than reporting on the speaker, Yalav wrote an article about the Palestinian conflict using [NAME REMOVED]'s statements as fact, including those that were not strictly based on [NAME REMOVED]'s experiences. News articles must be thoroughly fact-checked and utilize more than one source, especially on an issue so multi-dimensional and controversial as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Using one person's experience to represent objective fact is not something The Stentor can publish.
In the article, Yalav said that [NAME REMOVED] "spoke about the reality of the conflict often misconstrued by the western media," without any support for the alleged misrepresentation of the issue. This clause implies that whenever she ends a statement with, "according to [NAME REMOVED]," the reader is implored to believe that what [NAME REMOVED] states is true, not anything the reader may have heard from other western media outlets.
Yalav was given a week to further report, rework and resubmit the piece. The Editorial Board suggested that she find additional sources and present the other side of the story, as well as find a source for the serious charges she was levying in her article. We decided that a week would be sufficient to find sources, especially given the many resources in our school's faculty. Nevertheless, Yalav failed to find other sources, except for one professor whose comment was appended to the end of the article with no further comment and merely served to reinforce Yalav's views.
Finally, The Stentor allowed Yalav the opportunity to run the article as an opinion piece. Yalav refused, and instead submitted the letter to the editor printed above.
The Stentor does not focus on global issues- we are a college newspaper, and we focus on college and local issues. When we do occasionally run global-focus stories, we ensure that there is a local angle. While Yalav's article did indeed focus on an event at the College, we still must apply universal journalistic standards regarding factual accuracy. An article taking the opposite stance-that of Israel-and supporting its arguments as poorly as Yalav's did would have run into the same criticism and ultimate rejection from The Stentor staff.
Yalav demonstrated her bias when she said in an e-mail to The Stentor staff, "Here is the article about the Palestine presentation from Thursday night as well as a picture and a map which the presenter and I want to include with the article in The Stentor. Please send me the edited final version before it's published, this article means a lot to me." This is not a case of a journalist attempting to write an unbiased piece of news, but of an editorialist trying to present one side of an extremely complex issue without sufficient factual evidence.
On a closing note, we must address Yalav's thinly-veiled criticism of our columnist Mary Volk and our contributor Jared Fox. Volk's and Fox's columns both appear on the opinions page, and both focus on personal issues (and both are quite popular); they are not held to the same journalistic standards as a news story regarding a century-long conflict because they explicitly represent one opinion. Yalav herself wrote an opinion article last week deriding the appearance of panties in bathrooms and on students' rear ends, This seems to fit the category of entertainment more than any other, the same type of entertainment Yalav criticizes people for enjoying.
The Stentor does its very best every week to put out a quality newspaper. We do not censor free speech, and we make every reasonable effort to accommodate a plethora of issues and views. That being said, we must hold our news articles up to rigorous journalistic standards- standards which Yalav's article failed to meet.
The name of the speaker, as well as the original article, were removed from the website at the request of the original author. We apologize for any inconvenience.
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Cora
posted 4/25/08 @ 5:06 PM CST
Where can I find the original article? The print edition of this week's Stentor said that it would be added to the bottom of this post.
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