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In print | November 13, 2003

One of the central tenets of journalism is that reporters are not allowed to cover organizations or activities in which they are a part. Journalists cover the news; rarely do they make the news. If they do, they certainly do not cover their own news stories. Two weeks ago, The Phoenix inadvertently violated this principle.

In the Oct. 30 issue of The Phoenix, we ran a news article sent to us from the English department’s Journalism Workshop. The article, written by Andrew Sniderman ’06 and entitled “Students join ACT UP to fight AIDS,” primarily focused on the Philadelphia chapter of the national AIDS organizations and its local efforts at combating AIDS. A substantial part of the article, however, focused on the Swarthmore chapter of the Student Global AIDS Campaign, a grassroots AIDS awareness organization run by students across the country.

Since publishing this story two weeks ago, it has come to our attention that this article violated The Phoenix policy on full disclosure in its articles. Sniderman, we have since learned, is one of the members of the Student Global AIDS Campaign on campus. Sniderman did not inform of us his involvement with the AIDS group, and at the time, we — and the leaders of the journalism workshop — did not know about it either.

The Phoenix would like to apologize to the community for this transgression. Had we been aware of Sniderman’s membership in SGAC, we would not have printed his article. While it is the duty of the editors of The Phoenix to ensure that our policies and principles are upheld, students from a journalism class that has delved into understanding the ethics of fair reporting should know better than to submit such biased articles for publication.

Deirdre Conner ’04, who is aiding instructor Wendy Dowkings in the journalism class, explained her position in recommending the article for The Phoenix. “Wendy and I had no idea that he was involved with the group,” she said. “If we had, we would have told him to do something else; we have stressed to the class that conflicts of interest like this are not acceptable.”

It is Phoenix policy that staff reporters are not allowed to report on organizations of which they are a part. There is no place in the world of objective journalism for the kind of self-promotion found in Sniderman’s article.

While the leaders of the journalism class and we at The Phoenix do our best to stress the ethics of journalism, it is up to those people who submit articles to us to adhere to these principles. As we do not allow our reporters to cover events that present a conflict of interests, we cannot allow our contributors to do so either.

Benjamin Kabak

Editor in Chief

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