'YDN' owes readers an explanation

By Molly Ball

A notice began to appear at the bottom of the Yale Daily News' Opinion & Editorial page on Thurs., Sept. 16: Because of a potential conflict of interest regarding the Yale Daily News [YDN] coverage of the Esther Armmand-Asit Gosar Ward 7 aldermanic primary, Editor-in-Chief Isaiah Wilner was not involved with any aspect of the production of this issue. This arrangement will continue until the potential for conflict no longer exists.

But unless you know someone on the editorial board of the YDN, you wouldn't understand the machinations behind this terse announcement. And that's not fair.

As you ought to know by now, Asit Gosar, PC '00, stepped down from the race for Ward Seven Alder last week after allegations of voter fraud emerged against him. Gosar may have registered as many as 35 freshmen to vote in the Ward Seven Democratic primary, even though the freshmen live in Ward One.

Abetting Gosar in this endeavor was his friend and roommate Isaiah Wilner, PC '00. The dishonorable thing would have been to allow Wilner to continue to control the YDN's coverage of the affair, insisting his objectivity was not compromised by his involvement.

Instead, the YDN did the honorable thing. Its editorial board met the night after the story broke and decided to exclude Wilner from the day-to-day production of the YDN. As long as the Gosar story was covered, he would no longer oversee the selection of news stories or the editing of their content.

The YDN should be commended for this decision, but it didn't go far enough: the paper wasn't up-front with its readers.

Once the YDN's affairs got dragged into the public arena, the paper should have covered these internal politics just as honestly as it covered the scandal itself. What went on in that boardroom? If Wilner isn't supervising the paper's production, who is? The YDN would probably argue that these are behind-the-scenes, organizational concerns. But that's as absurd as the idea that the internal politics of the Committee to Re-elect the President were irrelevant to the Watergate break-in, and outside the realm of public interest.

As analogous, but not parallel, examples, consider how two prominent newspapers have handled organizational turmoil. A few years ago, Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke wrote a moving feature about an eight-year-old heroin addict. After the article won a Pulitzer Prize, questions began to surface. When the Post realized that Cooke had fabricated the story, it returned her award—and ran a front-page explanation of the mistake. The paper's coverage detailed all the conditions that allowed Cooke's piece to be printed.

Likewise, two award-winning Boston Globe columnists came under fire last year. Just months apart, both Patricia Smith and Mike Barnacle were found to have invented the "facts" in their columns. The paper laid itself bare, running stories that dissected its internal affairs in attempts to explain how its columnists had deceived its readers.

In these cases, newspapers misled their audiences. In the YDN's case, a newspaper has made a good-faith effort to insure that its audience is not misled. But readers who didn't see the tiny, italicized notice on the third-to-last page had no idea this effort was being made, and even those who did had no way of knowing what was behind it.

The YDN will elect a new board of editors this weekend, and Wilner's one-year term will be over, rendering speculation on his future mercifully immaterial. (All three reporters mentioned above resigned or were dismissed.) But that doesn't mean the YDN can rightfully cover up the tempest that abbreviated his term.

Like the Post and the Globe, the YDN should tell us what's going on behind its closed doors. If Wilner's involvement in a political scandal was important enough to exclude him from the YDN's production, it was important enough to merit an explanation to the YDN's readers. A real explanation—on Page One.

Molly Ball is a junior in Pierson.

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