Okay, I’m going to stop obsessing over Foxgate soon, honest. :) But, first, I just wanted to point out that I’ve created a separate category for my coverage of this, so if anyone wants to link to it, it’s there. All new posts about Foxgate will also appear in said category.
Secondly, I just wrote another e-mail that I wanted to share, this one to Dr. Michael Jackson, the various members of the Media Board, and university president Steven B. Sample. It’s after the jump.
FROM: bloy [at] nd.edu
TO: mjackson [at] usc.edu
CC: cravens [at] usc.edu, lswhite [at] usc.edu, mparks [at] usc.edu, lpryor [at] usc.edu, presofc [at] usc.edu
SUBJECT: Zach FoxDear Dr. Jackson (cc: the Media Board, President Sample),
I am writing to express my overwhelming dismay at your ill-advised decision to prevent the Daily Trojan’s duly elected editor-in-chief from assuming his rightful office. I do not know Zach Fox personally, but it is an outrage that Student Affairs would meddle in the affairs of USC’s independent student-run newspaper in this manner.
It has long been assumed by Daily Trojan staff that the Media Board approval process is largely a formality, with its only real function being to provide a final check against the unlikely event of an egregiously unqualified editor-in-chief assuming office. Instead, it is now being used to unilaterally veto the staff’s legitimate choice of a perfectly well-qualified candidate because the administration disagrees with his proposed editorial staffing policies. Such a “veto power” cannot be justified without utterly compromising the Daily Trojan’s cherished independence.
Dr. Jackson, your action is an insult to the staff of the Daily Trojan and to the student body of USC at large. It also flies in the face of the very principles of journalistic independence that USC purports to teach its students. As an alumnus of the Annenberg School of Journalism and a former Daily Trojan editor, I am deeply disturbed by what has occurred. It is totally unbecoming of a great university like the University of Southern California. I am especially offended that you would make such a decision and then refuse to comment on the record about your rationale. This suggests an extremely arrogant attitude toward the student body, implying that they don’t have the right to know why you made this decision. Such arrogance is especially disconcerting when it comes from the Vice President of Student Affairs, whose whole job is to work with students to make their experience at USC the best it can be.
I urge you to cancel Friday’s illegitimate “second election” and recognize Zach Fox as the Daily Trojan’s editor-in-chief. He was duly elected; as such, anyone else’s “approval” is irrelevant. If his ideas for reforming the newspaper are impractical, that can be discussed and worked out once he is in office. But if the Daily Trojan is truly a student-run newspaper, under no circumstances can Zach be prevented from taking office simply because the administration disagrees with his ideas.
Going forward, I urge you to eliminate the Media Board approval process, which has no role in the governance of an independent paper; apologize to Zach Fox and the entire Daily Trojan staff for your unjustifiable meddling in their affairs; release to the staff their budget, as Zach has rightly demanded, as well as their website passwords and all other relevant information that the students who “run” the newspaper should obviously have; and make an unequivocal written promise to the student body that the university will no longer attempt to exercise any control over the editorial content or personnel decisions of the Daily Trojan. It is essential that Daily Trojan editors and writers know that they are not beholden to the administration, and any suggestions from university employees are just that: suggestions, not orders. This line has been blurred far too often in the past, and now is the time to clarify matters and remind everyone, including yourselves, of the newspaper’s independence as a student-run entity.
I urge you to take the steps I have suggested promptly, and not to form a “committee” or “task force” to “study” them until the problem goes away. Too often, USC’s administration has used the inevitable turnover rate of student leadership to “wait out” controversies. This time around, I implore you to do the right thing. This alumnus, for one, will be watching.
If you are unwilling to take the steps I have suggested, or similar steps that would truly ensure the Daily Trojan’s independence, I sincerely hope the newspaper’s staff will revolt en masse and take their journalistic talents elsewhere. If they do not, they may want to change the newspaper’s masthead motto from “Daily Trojan: Student Newspaper of the University of Southern California” to “Daily Trojan: Administrative Mouthpiece of the University of Southern California.” It would be a more apt slogan, under the circumstances.
As an alumnus, I have recently received several solicitations for contributions to various university funds. You can rest assured I will not be donating any money to USC, or any department thereof, until this matter is satisfactorily resolved.
Sincerely,
Brendan Loy
B.A., Print Journalism and Political Science, USC Class of 2003
(now a third-year law student at Notre Dame, hence the bloy [at] nd.edu e-mail address)
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Categories: Daily Trojan: Zach Fox controversy
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November 29th, 2006 at 5:07:48 pm
Well said Brendan, well said
November 29th, 2006 at 6:16:18 pm
I hope this DT staff has the balls to stand up to the administration. I can rattle off a number of previous staffers who would have bent over and taken it.
November 29th, 2006 at 7:04:02 pm
If, indeed, the DT pays for itself, or even makes a profit, it should be well within the realm of possibility to establish an actual paper that services the readership of the DT.
If Sample and his minions came out and said that the usage of university facilities at less than market rates necessarily leads to a measure of control over the operations of the DT, would you be satisfied? In other words, if the legal fiction that the DT is “independent” were removed by USC, would you have an argument?
I share your loathing of university control of a student paper. I would much prefer the most unfettered/entangled paper possible. But that just ain’t reality.
So, my friend, what is the real argument? Legal fiction, or resentment over any university control?
November 29th, 2006 at 9:40:15 pm
You can’t be subsidized by the university and then whine about not being truly independent.
November 29th, 2006 at 9:48:32 pm
I was kind of wondering the same thing as USC 1L. From a “trademark” or “marketing” point of view, and using the terms very loosely, I doubt the university would allow the DT to use “USC,” “Southern California,” or any of the such, plus be at least partly subsidized without some sort of implied control. In that sense, they are hardly independent.
November 29th, 2006 at 9:54:59 pm
I finally read through all the links. Strangely or not, it seems as though the alums are more up in arms than the current staffers. C’mon, DTers! “More in sorrow than in anger” isn’t going to cut it. To quote Howard Beale, You’ve got to get MAD! Go to the window (you know, the one that looks onto Bovard) open the window, stick your head out the window, and yell, “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
Go ahead! “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
It’s worth mentioning here, only because it belongs somewhere, that the Daily Trojan owns the best suite of offices in the university, probably the best offices in any college paper in the country. The city room is the corner office in the top floor of the Student Union, complete with a balcony and a view stretching from Tommy Trojan all the way across the quad to EVK and Doheny Library. This is the territory that Hollywood films when it wants to portray the Ivy League on a limited budget (the HBO series “The Paper Chase” was films in its environs).
Every end-of-semester party would feature us lobbing beer bottles toward Bovard, which would then be followed by administration threats to shut off the balcony. Just remembering.
November 29th, 2006 at 10:02:41 pm
Along the lines of Ed’s reasoning, I find your reaction completely overblown. Certainly I understand how wed you are to the idea of journalism as a profession, and that combined with your “process matters!� mentality is more than sufficient to explain the source of your outrage. But I still find this a tad goofy, as there are a number of easy workarounds. I’ll mention two that my conniving mind finds amusing.
– Sly solution: Elect another EIC who commits to essentially being Zach Fox’s puppet and going forward on everything he wanted to do (in turn, Fox could assume another nominal editor position if he wishes to have a direct, legitimate role in the DT operations). I mean, it’s not like the university can physically and electronically ban Fox’s presence from the DT offices.
– Radical solution: Have the entire staff resign in protest and refuse to print the paper. Unmask the legal fiction and make the administration write its own damn “student� newspaper with no student help (or alternatively, with the help of “scabs�).
In any case, the changes that Fox is proposing probably are radical enough to require a task force, serious discussion, and gradual implementation. So ,why not take the administration’s concern at face value? Why not follow the process through before crying foul? Even from a pure philosophical perspective, I have to take Pryor seriously:
“He can’t just do something like this overnight. He could make some serious mistakes that could hurt the Daily Trojan,� Pryor said. “I admire his nerve and the changes he’s made this fall. But if he’s got a vision, he needs to bring everyone along. It would take at least six months to work this out, not the next six days.�
So the DT is run a particular way for decades, and in a matter of weeks, an EIC is going to turn that completely on its head? If I were the biggest financial stakeholder in the DT, I’d be pretty damn concerned, too!
The idea of “independence� is notional and scaleable, anyway. How “independent� any publication is is truly a matter of perception and interpretation. You really think the NYT editors operate with complete independence from Sulzberger? Suppose the shareholders of the NYT revolt and force Sulzberger to relinquish direct control over the paper and instead installed a Board of Directors � do you think the NYT would continue unchanged? Now suppose a private equity firm buys out the NYT in a hostile bid… you get the drift of where I am going. So long as the world revolves around money, “independence� will be a subjective determination. And in this case, given that the DT’s very raison d’etre relies on the existence of the University of Southern California, how could you not expect the university to have some control over the “independent� student newspaper � whether de facto or de jure?
Or how about the market aspect � can a newspaper ever be truly independent of its advertisers and/or its consumers? Hardly.
So, what we have here is a situation where a newspaper is completely financially dependent on the university to host it and fund it, and where the newspaper’s very raison d’etre is based on the continued successful operations of that university, and you expect “independence�? Ha! If the DT is about producing journalistic product, the student employees of the DT should be concerned about only one thing: being allowed to produce a journalistic product in a quasi-professional atmosphere so that the students can stay informed and the journalists/employees can develop their skills and professionalism. To the extent the university infringes on that journalistic mission (and I am pretty sure we all can agree that Sample, Jackson, and company have infringed on that mission aplenty), the DT should fight back to the best of its ability � and when it can’t win, it ought to settle for nothing less than the appearance of victory/defiance in order to maintain its organizational ethos. But picking a fight over control of finances is a pretty dumb, shortsighted, and petty battle to make � so don’t fight the battle and lose the war.
Finally, I don’t understand your complaint about Mona Cravens. How about, if you don’t like her influencing the DT’s decisions, stop listening to her. Goddamn, that was simple, wasn’t it?
November 30th, 2006 at 1:11:43 am
Andrew, I don’t think you are wrong in principal… However, while the New York Times is a publicly traded company, the majority of shares are class B, thus the company is not subject to hostile take over, and given class b shares are held by the family that originally owned the paper before taking it public, the ouster of the publisher is highly unlikely.
November 30th, 2006 at 1:20:19 am
I believe Brendan’s objection is not primarily that the Daily Trojan is financially dependent upon USC, but rather that USC administrators are deliberately exercising their power to short-circuit the journalistic decision-making process. This situation is far more analogous to a politician stepping in and replacing the editor in chief of the NYT than it is to a shareholder revolt.
November 30th, 2006 at 5:40:15 am
the issue here is hardly that the DT is financially dependent on the university.
in fact, the DT makes far more than it brings back — off-the-record conversations with top-level administrators have revealed that the DT subsidizes other, less successful publications to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars per year. that is advertising revenue brought in by the DT product that is fanned out to other publications which can’t support themselves in order to keep them running. clearly, student affairs — under which student publications runs — has a clear incentive to keep the budget out of students’ hands permanently. delegating all this to a task force is just a way of waiting out this tide of staffers until fox’s would-be revolution is over. also, DT staff are currently considering breaking away from campus — the office is nice but nothing to stick around under such duress for. but moving off campus to an independent model would require an incredibly sketchy start-up process and, more importantly, tens of thousands of dollars of risk on the part of college students who don’t have a penny to spare. it’s not off the table but is seen as an option of last resort — something the DT can’t start doing tomorrow.
November 30th, 2006 at 2:39:10 pm
My prediction: If the DT moves off campus, USC will create another fledgling student newspaper to replace/compete with the DT and pump its money into that instead. Within ten years, this whole fiasco will be forgotten and the situation will evolve into the status quo antebellum.
One question: Who owns the rights to the name, “Daily Trojan”? If it’s USC, you guys are royally fucked.