In the controversy engulfing newspapers that publish Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, college journalists have not escaped unscathed. The editor in chief and opinion editor of The Daily Illini, the student-led newspaper at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have been suspended from the paper after running the cartoons on Feb. 9, the paper’s publisher announced Wednesday.
The two-week suspension will allow a student task force to “investigate the internal decision-making and communication surrounding the publishing” of the Feb. 9 opinion page by Editor in Chief Acton Gorton and Opinions Editor Chuck Prochaska, according to a statement by Publisher and General Manager Mary Cory.
The suspension made national news Wednesday, appearing in the Chicago Tribune and on Poynter’s Romenesko blog, and rightly so; this case involves complex issues about the freedom of the student press and the journalistic process.
The decision to print the cartoons was an admittedly risky move – one that most major newspapers have avoided. But did Gorton make an appropriate decision?
In a Feb. 13 editorial, “Editorial staff breaks ranks,” other editors chastise Gorton and Prochaska for making the decision to run the “anti-Islamic” cartoons “without the knowledge of the Editorial Board, the editorial adviser and the publisher of the paper.” Although the board doesn’t necessarily disagree with the decision, it wasn’t handled tactfully and was initiated by the “callous bravado of a renegade editor in chief who firmly believes that his will is also the will of the paper.”
“This decision was made by two people behind the backs of those who are being significantly affected by its fallout,” they wrote.
In response, Gorton and Prochaska wrote an editorial defending their decision and called the apology by the editorial board a “grave error highlighting a lack of courage and commitment to a free press and the First Amendment.”
“The members of the editorial board are scared. They are scared of the unknown, scared of violence and scared to accept a principled action on our behalf, all the while hiding under the guise of the journalistic ‘process,’” they wrote.
“All editors present in the newsroom the night before publication learned of our decision to publish the cartoons. There were no objections. Not until they witnessed a backlash from the Muslim community, one that we were prepared for,” they wrote.
We believe the other staff members should have been properly warned about the publishing of the cartoons to allow them to take safety precautions.
However, the decision to remove the editors because they didn’t communicate is questionable. These editors didn’t break the law, and it’s unclear what policies the publisher is citing. We thus urge the board to identify formal rules the editors violated or reinstate their positions.
Gorton seems to have disenfranchised his own staff. This signals a failure to share his vision, and he should apologize.
We also question the decision to run the cartoons. We support the freedom to inform readers about newsworthy issues, but we have no plans to run the caricatures. As a college paper, most of our readers have easy access to the Internet, where the cartoons are freely available (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_cartoons). After weighing the benefits of running these cartoons, we cannot justify printing them.
There are no easy answers to the clash of cultural values illuminated by these cartoons and the backlash from those deeply offended by them. We condemn violence as a reaction to these cartoons, and we hope further understanding and cultural tolerance will somehow result. Sadly, this seems like an unlikely outcome.