Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/05/05/lacessit_me.php
Monday, May 5, 2008
Editor’s note: The Dartmouth Review introduces Lacessit Me as a periodical editorial feature. It will give the Review’s take on issues of the day.
Though journalistic integrity has always been an important issue, the issue Dartmouth currently finds itself wrestling with is that of editorial integrity, or—perhaps more aptly—editorial judgment. The responsibility of publishing a newspaper rests squarely on that of its editors, who are accountable for anything produced in that paper.
A contributor can submit anything he likes to his editors to be included in the paper, but they in turn have no obligation to publish it in their paper. The editors have to defend the integrity and respectability of their paper by upholding their own values of good taste. Numerous times this paper has chosen not to run a story because of its failings in good reporting, or good writing, or because it simply expressed views that we did not believe in and could not tacitly endorse by publishing. Our responsibility to our contributors does not extend so far as to publish whatever tract they’ve decided to write; if they believe deeply that their work needs to be published they are free to pursue different outlets, but we reserve the right not to publish.
Humorously enough, this issue of editorial duty has risen thanks to the comics section of the Daily Dartmouth. Two recent scandals have rocked the funny pages and raised concerns about the oversight that the Daily D exerts before publishing its paper.
The first controversy concerns Bora Kem’s “Sucka’ Punchline” in which Kem stole not only the theme, but also most of the material for his April 16, 2008 comic on fashion items celebrating mass murderers, such as Mao. Kem lifted this directly from Michael Ramirez, a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist with Investor’s Business Daily. When a student alerted the Daily D of this obvious plagiarism, the staff reacted by taking the offending comic off its website and cancelling Kem’s comic, without publishing any apology or excuse to the campus. The reaction was simply to pretend it did not happen and hope that no one read the widely circulated blog post revealing the plagiarism.
More recently, and far more sensationally, the “BlarFlex” comic attacked Bonnie Lam ’10 for her role in circulating a letter concerning the Association of Alumni election. While comics have previously exposed students to public ridicule—“Guy & Fellow” being the most notorious in recent memory—they were done with incisive attacks that made points. “BlarFlex” chose to make a series of jokes that played off the fact that Lam was of Asian descent and employed all the crudest racial “humor” it could muster, rather than lambasting her for her questionable behavior and comments—such as only circulating the petition to like-minded students. In this case the Daily D again removed the comic from its website, fired the creator, and this time had to publish a public apology promising for better editing in the future. They refused, however, to print the creator’s apology in any form, besides that of an advertisement.
Dartmouth deserves better from its college daily than this shoddy work, to say nothing of the fall in general quality in writing and production. The Daily Dartmouth should not be made into a forum for racism of any kind, far less the overt screed it treated students to last week. n