The Liberty Loft
A college newspaper at Vassar has retracted an article because it contained too many quotations from whites, and then went further to condemn the âwhite-centric, often elitistâ field of all journalism.
A college newspaper at Vassar has retracted an article because it contained too many quotations from whites, and then went further to condemn the âwhite-centric, often elitistâ field of all journalism. The Miscellany News at Vassar explained that it is retracting its article, âJeh Charles Johnson withdraws as 2022 commencement speaker,â weeks after it was published in February.
Itâs because, the paper explained, the article originally was to report on reaction to Johnsonâs selection as speaker, but then shortly before deadline, he withdrew.
âWe drastically changed the article from focusing solely on student responses to the announcement of him as speaker into an article describing his withdrawal and the reaction from the student body. In this article, we attempted to include a variety of quotes from students describing why there was protest to the announcement of him as speaker in the first place, and the studentsâ reaction to his withdrawal,â the paper said.
âWe made misguided and insensitive oversights with whom we were representing in the article and failed to provide in-depth reporting of the issue at large. The majority of our quotations came from white students and therefore we reduced the positions of students of color to a singular, tokenized perspective,â the paper said.
