Letters to the editor

An uninformed topic

To the Editor:

I found Michelle Dubert's latest column ("An intern? Situation could be a troubling burden to Kerry," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 02/16/04) in which she discussed the impact of an unsubstantiated rumor as if it were fact, to be inappropriate. It is this type of discussion that helped to brand poor Richard Jewell after the 1996 Olympic Park bombing. Just because the Drudge Report prints a charge does not make it credible.

The tenets of good journalism are anathema to Matt Drudge, who will print anything that makes a splash. If, in the four days since he reported that John Kerry had had an affair, any reputable news organization had been able to find even a shred of evidence supporting this claim, the story would be on front pages all over the country. But it is not, because most journalists are uncomfortable discussing vicious accusations backed by not a single piece of even tangential evidence.

As CNN's Jeff Greenfield explained last week, "in another time, the press would know what to do with this kind of story: run it down, check it out, try to find out who is spreading the rumor and why, maybe even ask if it is true, does it matter." But even though times have changed, respectable news outlets, such as the DP, ought not be offering speculation about the impact of an allegation that is as disconnected from fact as George Steinbrenner is from poverty.

Even if it is a public rumor, Miss Dubert should not be writing about this allegation unless she has some information substantiating the charge. Indeed, even her efforts to bolster what she admitted was an unproven accusation were weak. Would General Wesley Clark have endorsed John Kerry last week if he believed that Kerry would "implode over an intern issue?" If that was not bad enough, Miss Dubert got her facts wrong. She discussed the impact of Kerry having had an affair with an intern, when in fact the woman in question is a journalist who never worked for him. This type of column risks less-informed people reading it and viewing it as validating the rumor because a news source that they trust saw fit to discuss it.

Brian Rosenwald

SAS '06

Flawed scholarship message

To the Editor:

Those Americans whose anger was incited by the scholarship recently awarded by the College Republicans of Roger Williams University really don't need to get so worked up; the student group's decision to put together the scholarship, whose sole requirement was that the applicant be white, simply demonstrates their ignorance. Had the College Republicans of RWU actually examined even a small representative sample of existing scholarships aimed at traditionally disadvantaged students, they would have quickly realized that the vast majority of them don't award scholarships based on ethnicity alone.

While I'm a current supporter of affirmative action, I also believe (as most supporters do) that it would be a mistake to continue enforcing affirmative action policies once equality has been achieved. The RWU College Republicans have every right to make political statements to speed the end of affirmative action if that is their goal. But if their political statements continue to come in this form of flawed parody, the RWU College Republicans' cause will continue to be nothing but laughable.

Alexander Mittal

Wharton and Engineering '07

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