The Crimson Flooded By Controversy

A recent decision to hold an article from the print edition of the Harvard Crimson has thrown the newspaper into a debate about the independence of its news section.

Shortly before publication of Friday's issue, the president of the Crimson, William Marra, Harvard '07, pulled a news article about an opinion columnist, Victoria Ilyinsky, Harvard '07, who was alleged to have not properly cited her sources in an Oct. 16 column. Instead, the news article ran exclusively online while the editorial announcement of her firing ran in the paper.

Managing editor Daniel Hemel, also Harvard '07, printed a blank space in protest on the third page of the Crimson edition where the article would have run.

Hemel declined to comment on the incident.

The Crimson had a chance to revisit Friday's decision when evidence surfaced over the weekend that cartoons by Crimson cartoonist Kathleen Breeden, Harvard '09, resembled cartoons published in Newsday and other publications.

Monday's paper ran both a news article investigating the similarities and an editorial announcement that explained the incident and said that Breeden would step down as a Crimson cartoonist.

Marra said he decided to delay the release of the news article on Ilyinsky in order to give the editorial board the chance to be the first to address its internal concerns, wanting to avoid the "impression" that there had been a "coordinated attack on ... [Ilyinsky.]"

But others said the decision was tantamount to censorship.

"The Crimson was censored Thursday night," wrote former managing editor Zach Seward in an e-mail printed on the blog IvyGate.

In the same e-mail, Seward said that the decision actually sabotaged its goal of keeping the news page independent from the opinion page.

"The only relevant question is whether the news and editorial boards actually acted in concert, which until Will's intervention, they did not," he said.

Furthermore, Seward suggested Marra should have had no hand in deciding whether to print the article, since as president he had been involved in the decision to fire Ilyinsky.

But Marra said that there was no conflict of interest involved.

"I think that my job as president of the newspaper is to coordinate coverage across the newspaper and to do what is best for the entire building," he said.

Marra also said that he had received a lot of support for his decision. He added that the choice to run both pieces on the cartoonist followed the same principle of separation between news and editorial as the decision to delay the Ilyinsky article Friday.

"The news board ran a story ... about the similarities without knowing what the editorial board said," he said.

Marra also said the paper would addressing the issue of plagiarism raised by both Ilyinsky's column and Breeden's cartoons.

When asked if he though the incidents pointed to a larger problem within the Crimson, Marra said that neither Ilyinsky or Breeden had been through the paper's "rigorous training process" for the posts they had held.