The Spectator and Said

When Commentary published Justus Reid Weiner's article questioning Edward Said's life story, I was the editorial page editor of the Spectator, and I wrote a staff editorial condemning the article and defending Professor Said. It didn't run because the Managing Board at the time thought the strongly worded piece was too aggressive.

I abandoned the piece because a columnist wrote a much better one that said the same things. I gave that column the title I was going to use-"The Love Song of J. Reid Weiner"-and it got me in trouble with the columnist, who thought it was inappropriate for his serious piece. At the time, I thought it exposed the absurdity of the situation-someone so smitten in his spite that he spent years traveling the globe with tape measure in hand, trying to prove that one of the world's foremost scholars hadn't actually lived in x house for x amount of time.

I recognized that such charges against anyone's character and life's work are frustrating and hurtful, but I thought humor would be a good way to undermine the charges and make the whole enterprise of attempted character defamation seem baseless. Well now we're back in the thick of it, on the other end, and it's not so funny. On Tuesday, September 5, the Spectator published a staff editorial that condemned Professor Said's actions over the summer when he was photographed throwing a rock over the Lebanese border, and then objecting to his subsequent explanations. The piece was accompanied by a dissent from our Managing Editor saying that Professor Said's lifetime of scholarship and activism for peace shouldn't be forgotten, and an opinion piece by two professors going into more accusatory detail about the rock-throwing incident.

In the ensuing week, the Spectator has received numerous letters, been contacted by many angered professors, and been solicited for conflict resolution by the University Ombuds office. This week there will be many letters, some editors' notes, and some Op-Ed pieces. As the editor-in-chief of the Spectator I'm in a unique position to speak from our end in an official capacity. But in this column I am not speaking for the Spectator, I am merely speaking for myself. This is not an easy column to write, because the line between being honest and accountable and airing a newspaper's internal dirty laundry is a tough one to walk. But then, it's also tough to be in the shoes of people who have had their character assailed in print.

Professional newspapers have two "church/state" walls-one separating the business and content operations, and another separating the news-gathering and opinion sections. College newspapers by and large have no such distinction. Like at other schools' papers, at the Spectator, unsigned staff editorials are written by someone in the Opinion section, but then voted on by the entire Managing Board. No news reporters or associate editors are involved. When a vote is close, or when some on the Board strongly disagree, one of them can write a dissent, which is published beneath the Staff Editorial as an "Editorial Journal." It has worked like this for years to some degree of success, and it has proven to be the best way to do things. It does have its flaws, though, and the system is under

perennial internal scrutiny.

And the last week has shown that there is some external scrutiny, as well. It is ironic, because I get the impression that had that editorial about the Commentary article run, we would have received no feedback at all. We got no feedback when we ran a laudatory staff editorial on the occasion of Professor Said becoming President of the Modern Language Association.

No, the feedback floodgate seems to open up only when the tone is negative. The challenge facing us at the Spectator now is to turn this incident around into an opportunity for constructive discourse and debate. That, after all, is the purpose of our Editorial Page, and that was my thinking when I went into compromise mode last Monday night and tried to broker a deal whereby this and that were cut from the editorial and the dissent ran and hopefully there would be enough information on all sides to serve the readers. This was overly ambitious, and I don't feel it was accomplished. But hopefully it will be in the coming week.

It wasn't the only time this week when deal making and compromise didn't turn up results. One-on-one discussion worked out in dealing with professors who wrote responses, and the overtures from the Ombuds office proved unnecessary. Although we are in the process of getting an independent Ombudsman for the Spectator, in the meantime we use the line of reasoning held by the New York Times and many other papers: the editors are the ombudsmen.

I felt it was important to illuminate some of the behind the scenes workings at the Spectator. People should understand that we work, at times in a flawed way, in the interest of facilitating discussion and intellectual debate, and not in the interest of any agenda or overriding ideology.

The Spectator has sad its piece, and the debate will go on. And hopefully when the discussion turns to sparring, we can bring it back in the spirit of direct communication and tolerance, rather than endlessly intermediated quarreling. This is also the foundation for belief in a peaceful, bi-national solution to the woes of the Middle East. The same peaceful solution that Professor Said has spent his life working toward.