University Newspaper: The Center of Attention
A newspaper usually makes others the center of critical attention. But what happens when the newspaper itself becomes the focus of a media controversy?
On March 28, all eyes were on the Daily Texan— the student newspaper of the University of Texas. The Opinion page featured a cartoon showing a white mother reading to her child, "And then ... the big bad white man killed the handsome, sweet, innocent colored boy," from a book visibly titled "Treyvon (sic) Martin and the case of yellow journalism.”
Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old teenager from Sanford, Fla., killed last month allegedly by Geroge Zimmerman— a neighborhood watch volunteer who claims the shooting was in self-defense.
The political cartoon quickly received national attention that day. As I sat in the basement of William Randolph Hearst Building that day, I could feel the tension mounting in the newsroom.
The door that connects the Texan to the outside world kept opening and closing. Reporters, photographers and editors flocked in every now and then and whisper, "It's blowing up. It's everywhere." Someone said the Gawker is reporting on the cartoon. Then, Huffington Post picked it up. The news about the editorial cartoon had gone viral in a matter of few hours. The Texan staff was left to deal with a huge media blunder.
The Texan's editor-in-chief Vivana Aldous said when her and the other four members of the editorial board had a discussion about running the cartoon the day before, they were not expecting this reaction at all.
"We saw the cartoon that ran Tuesday and did not agree with it," Aldous says.
She hesitates about giving full-length quotes. In fact, she says she does not want to be quoted if she can help it. Viviana is applying for law school this summer.
"This is going to come up when people google me," Aldous whispers to her colleagues.
Aldous was not the cartoonist, but somehow people found her Facebook picture and posted it in their tweets on Twitter. The Daily Texan received about two or three tweets per minute that day. Most of the people expressed grave disappointment at the Texan’s staff for running the cartoon.
Quickly, Aldous asked Stephanie Eisner— the author of the illustration and political cartoonist for the Texan's editorial board— to take her information off the University's directory. She asks Eisner to also make her Facebook page private.
This is bad, managing editor Audrey White kept saying to herself. She was standing a few feet away from me, talking to the Texan's advisor Doug Warren. They talked about a possible reaction story for tomorrow's paper, but everyone was occupied. They turned around and saw me looking at them.
"Huma! You want to do a story?," White asks me.
I was at the Texan that day to do a feature on how students manage to produce a daily newspaper despite hectic schedules. I got drafted to do a story for them instead.
I spoke to Aldous and then I spoke to Eisner. Both seemed frazzled. Eisner told me she doesn't feel apologetic, but she knows she didn't get the message across successfully. She said her cartoon was a comment on how the media is portraying the coverage of this case.
"I feel the news should be unbiased. And in the retelling of this particular event, I felt that that was not the case,” Eisner said. “My story compared this situation to yellow journalism in the past, where aspects of news stories were blown out of proportion with the intention of selling papers and enticing emotions.”
As I wrapped up my conversation with Eisner, I started looking up black student organizations on campus. Stephanie gave me an apologetic look. She knew I would be talking to some angry students. I assured her I will be fine and that this is part of my job. A learning experience, as Warren says later when I speak to him in his small office in the same basement.
Warren has been the Texan's adviser since 2010. He worked at the Boston Globe for 21 years before moving to Texas. He has been around these types of situations many times before.
"In my professional career, we were frequently and never willingly at the center of media's attention," Warren says.
He recalls the Globe's coverage of a couple’s murder in New Hampshire in 1998. Two people had died. In the story, the Globe reporter wrote that the man killed was having an affair and police was looking into whether that was part of the reason why someone might have murdered him. That day, Warren said he got a phone call from the man's daughter. She asked him how they could publish a story like that. She affirmed that it's a lie and that her father was not having an affair. Later, the rumored affair turns out to be false.
Warren turned his face away from me for a few seconds while retelling me this. When he turned back, his face had changed.
"Even now it chokes me up. What am I supposed to say to that person?," he said. "She just lost both her parents and it's almost like we killed them again."
He said journalists have to realize that there are lives being impacted by what a paper publishes. Warren said that he will go down with the ship defending the Texan's rights to publish, he can put himself in people's shoes to see how they are affected by what's in the paper.
Nevertheless, he says being in a media controversy is always a valuable experience.
Many who gathered at a "Justice for Trayvon" rally that evening at the Texas capitol saw the cartoon as racist. They handed out copies of the paper saying it is a prime example of racial bias in the media. Andrew Messamore, a general reporter for the Texan who was covering the rally, relayed to us what happened. White and Warren shook their heads as they listened.
This is bad, but they will pull themselves out of it. In a few weeks, people will probably cease to talk about it.
Regardless, it was a long night at the Daily Texan. The day slowly merged into night. When I left the basement late into the night, I saw many staff members perched at their stations, working to churn out the next day's paper. The next day’s paper contained many guest editorials regarding the cartoon-- disapproving of the way editorial board handled the situation. About 40 students gathered outside the Texan’s building to demand an apology. Eisner, who said she won’t apologize, did. She also stepped down. The editorial board apologized.
As I sat in the KUT radio newsroom the next day for my internship, I kept hearing Your News Network playing the Texan’s cartoon clip over and over again on T.V. Someone finally turned down the volume, but I could hear it in my mind on repeat: “The Daily Texan wins Gawker’s most racist Trayvon Martin’s cartoon contest.”
