Word: mandel
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Andrew K. Mandel '00 is in Japan this summer, spreading the joys of subject-verb agreement and requesting "Opposites Attract" from the English-speaking radio station just...
...problems arose when The Crimson, a subscriber to the e-mail list, decided to run a story about the debate using quotations from the e-mails sent out over the list. Andrew Mandel '00, the staff writer assigned to the story, contacted members of the group to confirm their e-mail quotations...
While some members of the group were happy to be quoted, others did not get back to Mandel to validate their quotations. Yet a third group, including the writer of the original e-mail that sparked the exchanges, expressly denied permission to use its views in the story. Nevertheless, when The Crimson story ran on April 6, it included a number of quotations from the original e-mails of these unconfirmed and unwilling sources, albeit anonymously...
Crimson insiders have three responses. Mandel says, "firstly, there is an issue of whether anything you post to a list of 242 members can be private. Especially when you know a newspaper is among the subscribers. Once you post something, I think it's out there, it's on the record." Crimson President Matthew Granade '99 adds, "anyone can check who's on the list--they know we're on the list. If you want a private list, you can close lists, this was an open list." And finally, The Crimson claims it also had a source within Kuumba forward...
Legal technicalities aside, there are broader issues of journalistic priorities. Should a newspaper cite sources against their wishes? Kuumba members were perhaps most upset over this blatant violation of their stated desire for privacy. The Crimson responds with a hardball journalistic obligation to report the news. As Mandel puts it, "The story was newsworthy, and it could not be written without those e-mails. At that point, a newspaper has an obligation to use the sources even against the wishes of the writers." Granade reiterates this commitment, "It's like the Pentagon Papers--If it's newsworthy, the community deserves...