Paul, to me a much worse breach of journalistic ethics is the editor’s response today to the controversy over Bandes’ column. You identified the passage containing the “unethical” juxtaposition of her opinion and her accurately quoted sources’ opinions as reason enough for her to be “reprimanded if not fired” (emphasis mine). I can understand a reprimand, but not firing. And maybe it’s from my background as a copy editor that I see the situation thus: What we have here is a failure to edit.

A good editor would have noticed this awkward juxtaposition and questioned the author about it. A good editor would have noticed the apparent contradiction, as Paul did. A good editor would not have passed on it and then, at the first howls of outrage, thrown the writer to the wolves. The column should have been either clarified or perhaps spiked.

This is a student newspaper, after all, meaning its writers, editors, photographers, et al. are still learning their trade. The unnecessarily extreme measure of firing Bandes has blown the issue of juxtaposition entirely out of proportion, and given how it was done, it has now become a free-speech issue rather than a mere better-editing one. Bandes didn’t make the quotations up, and a reasonable reader could see that her sources weren’t agreeing that Arabs and they themselves should be “sexed up like nothing else” at airports. It was pretty evident that they were agreeing with her as to the necessity of racial profiling, not with her particularly stark way of phrasing it.1

The very first quote she gives after her “sexed up” comment includes her clarification of her source’s statement (who probably said “It”): “(Racial profiling) really doesn’t bother me,” said Sherief Khaki, a first-generation Egyptian-American and representative of the UNC-CH Arabic Club (emphasis added).

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1. This is the point where, were the particularly stark phrase in question a gratuitous anti-American comment, that the Furrowed Brows in academe would excuse the excessiveness of the comment with the justification that it “at least generated discussion about the subject.”