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Letter from the Editor
By Rachel Reynolds '07
EDITOR IN CHIEF

As Editor of the Sweet Briar Voice, I have been responsible for the publication of several articles that have garnered criticism over their controversial nature from faculty and students. I was very surprised, however, to read the letters from Hafsa Zaghmout and especially Marieme Diop. I felt that their letters should be published, but that several of their comments needed formal addressing.

First, it should be noted that the writer, Emily Clifton ’08, was assigned the story by me, and it was copy-edited for form and content by myself as well. So while I’m sure she stands by her article, I am ultimately accountable for both the idea and the finished draft, not her.

Second, I must issue a clarification regarding the statement in the article, stating that “Goode (R) represents the area local to Sweet Briar.” This was meant to say that Goode is a local congressman, but not Sweet Briar’s congressman. We apologize for any misconceptions this might have caused.

I would also like to speak to the assertion that our polling is inaccurate or leading. The article should have stated that poll was unscientific. However, the poll was conducted by a random sampling of students, and the percentage polled was actually extremely high. Multi-million dollar polling companies like CNN, Gallup, and Zogby use as few as a thousand people to represent the entire United States population (300 million). By that standard, 54 out of 700 is not a low number.

As to the claim that the poll was leading—we simply read Goode’s words, verbatim, to the respondents, and asked whether they agreed, disagreed, or did not care. I was hoping, truthfully, that the poll would reveal the opposite of what it did. But having been a student at this school for nearly four years now, I regret to say that I was not terribly surprised by the actual results.

Having said this, I would like to attend to the most disturbing complaints in the two letters: that the Voice should have expressly disapproved of the students who responded in agreement with Goode’s opinions, or that we should have cut the story altogether to avoid hurting people’s feelings. To be perfectly clear: the Sweet Briar Voice stands firmly and unequivocally against bigotry or prejudice of any kind. Furthermore, as the official voice of this newspaper, I have to say that we find Goode’s statements embarrassing and disgusting, both as educated people and as Americans. We simply did not allow those feelings to influence the objectivity of a news story.

Last week I attended an editor’s workshop at the New York Times, and Assistant Managing Editor Bill Schmidt spoke about the hallowed nature of journalistic objectivity. He recounted a time when the Times came under fire for publishing similar stories, describing the evils perpetrated against Blacks during the Civil Rights movement without explicitly condemning them. The Times “did not have to make a moral argument,” he said, adding that the Times staff believed that the events “spoke for themselves.” We felt the same way.

And finally, the idea that we should censor material that makes people uncomfortable is antithetical to the nature of journalistic and academic honesty. The day that we begin to confer moral judgments upon information is the day that we lose all credibility and integrity as journalists and students. I am sorry that Ms. Diop and Ms. Zaghmout felt distressed by the article’s valid presentation of some very disturbing news. But we cannot make decisions about whether to publish or not based on those merits. I hope they, and our readers, understand.