Aanchal Kapoor and TSL: An Update

On Wednesday, April 2 The Student Life finally responded to Aanchal's last email, which was sent on February 20, 2008. Apologies for the delay.

Dear Aanchal Kapoor:

As a managing editor indicated in a letter to you on February 19, The Student Life rejected your request for a retraction of your article dated February 15. In the interest of transparency, we will indicate how TSL came to this decision.

In general, TSL only prints clarifications of news articles that distort or misrepresent an objective account, typically through the accidental omission of context or the imprecise use of language, but do not technically misreport fact. The newspaper only makes corrections to articles when specific parts are misreported; if such errors are broad enough to affect the basic premise of an article or subsequent conclusions in an article, the article becomes a candidate for retraction. The newspaper also considers retraction in the following exceptional instances:

· Plagiarism – If an article is shown to be the original work of a writer not assigned by to TSL to work on said article, it should be retracted immediately.

· Hardship - The newspaper periodically reviews requests by alumni who wish to have an article retracted that they feel might damage their reputation. The newspaper approves these requests only if the writer makes a convincing argument that hardship is caused by the continued presence of said article. This argument is weighed against the need for an accurate historical record.

Corrections and retractions are only made after a senior editor has reviewed a concern or complaint, and subsequently decides an error has been made. The Editor-in-Chief retains the right to review and reverse any senior editor’s decision.

You have not identified any factual errors in the article we printed, but we have reviewed it nonetheless, and found no errors. No readers have sent word of errors in the article. Furthermore, your claim, that the changes made to the article during the editing process make it not yours, does not fit any established standard for retracting articles. The Student Life stands behind the article as it was printed. We believe that the article is consistent with the highest standards of journalism – accuracy, depth, balance – and that this was the product of, among other factors, a rigorous editing process.

In a standard consistent with major mainstream journalism publications, TSL news writers are trained to gather and present the news, not to be opinion-makers or pundits. In the particular case of your article on the White Party, two senior editors and a section editor read an early draft and found it to be too biased and unfair to run in the news section.

The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) produces a document called the “Code of Ethics,” the most widely used in journalism. Their second guideline says that journalists should: “Diligently seek out subjects of news stories to give them the opportunity to respond to allegations of wrongdoing.” The article you sent accuses Scripps Dean of Students Debra Wood of “falsely accusing organizers of Claremont McKenna College’s White Party of promoting racism and sexism,” prints and debates several sentences of Ms. Wood’s email, and follows these comments with reactions from the party organizers and a DJ hired to work at the party who, you report, demanded “an apology.” In the first paragraph, you wrote that a Washington Post blogger nominated her for his/her “Idiot of the Year Award.” This would have been OK if you had contacted Wood to see what her opinion was, but you made no effort – whether diligent or dilatory – to contact Ms. Wood for her opinion, much less to give her the opportunity to respond to these claims. This is a violation of the SPJ code. Our news editor was forced, as a result, to interview Ms. Wood.

You also did not interview students who were offended by the advertising for the White Party, though there were many. This violates the SPJ mandate to “[t]est the accuracy of information from all sources and exercise care to avoid inadvertent error,” “[g]ive voice to the voiceless,” and “distinguish between advocacy and news reporting” because “analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context.” Journalists are also encouraged to “admit mistakes and correct them promptly.”

Bias is not an unusual problem, and your article went through a standard revision process. You were not consulted in this process because editors were working under deadline, and because the article’s presentation of facts was under question, but the facts per se were not. News articles are the collaboration of reporters, who are given credit on the byline for their reporting and writing, and a battery of editors, who are not credited, but are tasked with maintaining the publication’s standards.

In this instance, this is precisely what TSL did.

This letter is not intended to be confidential, and we encourage you to share it with your editors at the Claremont Conservative. We trust that you will contact us if you have further questions.

Sincerely,

TSL Editorial Board

Rylan Stewart, Editor-in-Chief

Trevor Hunnicutt, Managing Editor

Andrea Kretchmer, Managing Editor

"Your editors at the Claremont Conservative"? Aanchal Kapoor writes for the Claremont Independent, not the Claremont Conservative. Maybe the TSL staff needs a crash course on editing. They clearly don't understand the process.