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4/01/2003 12:29:00 AM | Timothy Columbia Spectator covers its butt De Genova says in a letter to the Columbia Spectator: "Spectator, now for the second time in less than a year, has succeeded to quote me in a remarkably decontextualized and inflammatory manner." I have to note, if only because my interest in the quality of college dailies, that it seems that this sentence written by Spectator reporter Margaret Hunt Gram is either dishonest or bad reporting: Once before in his time at Columbia has De Genova incited critics by making political statements that he says were taken out of context. During a pro-Palestinian sit-in in the April of last year, he stated at an open microphone, "The heritage of the victims of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. The state of Israel has no legitimate claim to the heritage of the Holocaust. The heritage of the oppressed belongs to the oppressed--not the oppressor."Gram does not mention the reason De Genova complained about being taken out of context in this earlier incident: the original Spectator article quoting De Genova did not include the last sentence of his comments. Does this matter for context? The Spectator must think so: it was apparently embarrassed about their earlier, shorter quote of De Genova enough to think it was needed for context this time around. Otherwise, why (aside from incompetance) would the Spectator have added the last part of the quote back in without mentioning that its original absence was the source of De Genova's complaint about the lack of context? That earlier letter to the editor by De Genova was titled "Professor Corrects Misquote in Palestinian Protest Article," but you will not learn that from Gram's reporting, which is dishonest on the Spectator's own terms. By the way, having been present at De Genova's speech at the teach-in last week, I do not think he has anything to complain about in that instance. He did not make any larger argument, but basically just listed the past history of U.S. imperialism and then made his inflammatory comments. I do not think De Genova can point to a sentence, as he thought he could the first time, that he thinks would have put his 'Mogadishu' statement and other inflammatory rhetoric in context (should the Spectator have included the entire history of U.S. imperialism in its recent article?). Aside from confirming my bias against campus daily papers, does this matter? Well, it might leave readers of the Spectator confused as to the source of De Genova's complaints about the earlier incident (and perhaps wrongly feeds in De Genova a sense that he was wronged again). Here's what Andrew Sullivan says: "And notice also from this piece de Genova's explanation: these remarks were taken 'out of context.' In what context would they be ok?" perma link |
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