Fishy at DePauw
What’s a journo-fish?
Years ago, I read a bizarre New York Times science article called Sex Change in Fish Found Common. It began…
When a school of reef fish loses its single male, the largest female begins acting like a male within a few hours and will produce sperm within 10 days.
Wild, right?
But that doesn’t just happen in schools of fish. Something similar happens in schools of journalism.
Sadly, some journalists who become professors begin acting like administrators within days. Instead of sperm, they produce spin. I wrote about it last month, when several journos-turned-profs illegally closed a meeting of a Journalism Task Force.
Now it’s happened at DePauw University, an hour outside Indianapolis – and the birthplace of SPJ more than a century ago. A brand-new professor, who was previously an excellent journalist, helped depose a student editor for what she calls a “breach of ethics.”
Except it wasn’t. Even SPJ’s ethics chairman says so.
She’s a whale of a reporter.
The newspaper at DePauw is called, uncleverly, The DePauw. It’s 164 years old, but a new adviser started just this school year.
I met Meg Kissinger during her first week on the job, when I visited DePauw to lead a four-day training seminar for the newspaper staff. She was quite nice. Which, of course, makes what happened next quite awful.
Kissinger has spent 38 years on the job, many of them as an investigative reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She was a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist who specializes in covering mental health. (Check this out, it’s very cool.)
Kissinger graduated from DePauw in 1979, so it only made sense she’d return to train a new generation of kick-ass journalists.
Yet last semester, she – along with a group of school officials – removed The DePauw’s editor-in-chief for what they call “a damaging and avoidable conflict of interest.”
What did this editor do? She gave a preacher a sandwich.
She’s a pain in the bass.
In September, Nicole DeCriscio covered a familiar story: Crazy preachers who tour college campuses to verbally assault sinning students.
At DePauw, The Campus Ministry USA sent five members to harangue passing students as “baby killers, masturbators, porno freaks, feminists” and other interesting insults.
At most campuses, students mock the preachers, while campus cops roust anyone getting too agitated. When the drama ebbs, the traveling show moves on.
Not at DePauw.
DeCriscio and one of her reporters covered the preachers’ first visit, which so angered one woman, she threw hot coffee at them. Police officers even tackled a student and an administrator — both black men. Suddenly, the cops were the story, and the campus outcry was enough for DePauw’s president to call an “open forum” to talk about both the preachers and the police.
DeCriscio and one of her reporters covered the preachers’ follow-up visit the next week, which was anti-climactic. Prepared this time, students and faculty laughed at the preachers, and police sighed with relief.
Undaunted, the preachers tried one last time before migrating to another campus. Figuring the story was over, DeCriscio decided to do something different and dig a little deeper. So she wrote a first-person column called Why I Brought Brother Jed A Sandwich…
I think that if they turned in their signs reading “You promote rape” and “Yoga pants are a sin” for something like “Ask me about Jesus Christ,” they would be far more effective. Each of them have a remarkable testimony that has the power to change the hearts and minds of others. It has the ability to bring others to Christ…I’m sad that my brothers and sisters in Christ at DePauw, which even include some members of the faculty and staff, failed to demonstrate Christ’s love.
That was too much for Kissinger. DeCriscio was fired 12 days later.
Carping on this letter.
DeCriscio was fired the old-fashioned way: She was handed a letter on stationery. (Click the image above to read it.) Her offense was explained like this…
You had already established yourself as a reporter covering the news of the events surrounding Campus Ministries’ visit to campus. By inserting yourself as an interested actor within the ongoing news story, you created a conflict of interest that was both avoidable and ultimately damaging to the reputation of The DePauw.
When I called Kissinger to ask if the editor was really fired for writing an opinion column, the conversation went like this…
Kissinger: The problem was, how could she impartially oversee coverage of the story for the rest of the semester?
Me: But Nicole says the story was over. She told me, “When I wrote the column about the sandwich, the preachers had no intention of coming back to DePauw that semester.”
Kissinger: There’s no way of knowing that.
Me: Fair enough, but she says if they did come back, she’d just assign the story to someone else – which she can do, because, I mean, she’s the editor. Is this really a firing offense?
Kissinger: She wasn’t fired.
Me: Uh…what?
Kissinger: She wasn’t fired. She was suspended for the remainder of her term.
Me: What’s the difference?
Kissinger: Well, it’s not like she’s banned from the paper.
Me: She’s not?
Kissinger: She’s welcome to write any other stories for the paper. She knows that. She’s welcome to write a review for the paper, and she can cover another story.
Me: But if she wrote something so terrible that it got her fired, why is it OK for her to write something else now?
Kissinger: She wasn’t fired, Michael. She was suspended because it was a conflict of interest for her to express her opinion. Really, that’s in the SPJ Code of Ethics.
Except it’s really not.
He’s saying, “Holy mackerel!”
As SPJ’s ethics chair, Andrew Seaman‘s job is usually one of nuance and restraint. Many ethical conundrums require sublime parsing.
Not this one.
“I take issue with the adviser’s draconian approach,” he told me after reading the letter and Kissinger’s explanation. “I don’t think giving protesters sandwiches and drinks really interferes with Nicole’s ability to do a good story.”
Even if it did, “I still say the offense didn’t fit the punishment – especially for a student publication.”
As Seaman explains…
Student newspapers are laboratories for journalists in training. Unless an offense is on par with plagiarism, fabrication, and the ilk, professors and advisers should use perceived errors as educational moments.
But he doesn’t perceive any errors…
The SPJ Code of Ethics says: “Ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one’s work and explaining one’s decisions to the public.” Didn’t Nicole live up to that by explaining her actions? Really, Nicole could argue she addressed nearly all of the principles under the Code’s tenet to “be accountable and transparent.”
Seaman is stunned – and galled – that SPJ’s Code of Ethics was twisted into a reason to fire a student editor…
As someone who helped write the revised Code of Ethics and served as its guardian since its adoption, I can say DePauw’s actions are not keeping with the spirit of the document. In my opinion, everyone there overreacted, took Draconian action, and now are stuck defending those decisions.
Seaman’s conclusion: “In the grand scheme of things, the editor of a student publication took some protesters food and drinks. Is that really worth all this trouble? I don’t think so.”
The sole reason for all this.
If DeCriscio was fired – er, suspended – for violating SPJ’s Code of Ethics when SPJ’s ethics chair says she didn’t, something fishy is going on here.
DeCriscio thinks it was this…
The campus had decided to hate Brother Jed. Because I saw him as a whole person, I think it was the content why I got fired. Meg said the same thing would have happened if I wrote about kittens, but I don’t believe that.
My theory is slightly different: DeCriscio was also fired to protect an adviser who she says drank with her students in the newsroom.
When I visited DePauw last summer, I asked the newspaper’s editors what they did for fun when they weren’t doing journalism. The answer: “We drink.” How much? “A lot.”
The students told me drinking is a huge problem at DePauw, and they credit the administration with valiantly trying to keep it sane. But they also say it doesn’t make a dent.
“There’s nothing else to do around here,” the (under-aged) art director told me, waving a hand to indicate the entire town of Greencastle, Indiana.
The week I visited, I hung out with the editors on deadline – and watched many of them rush through production so they could go drink. The art director joked, “We should just start drinking in the newsroom.”
A few weeks after I left, DeCriscio said that’s exactly what happened – and Meg Kissinger drank with the staff.
“My staff first drank on deadline the Thursday before Brother Jed’s visit,” she says. “They started around 7. They also mostly hid it from me by putting it in closed water bottles. That was the night that Meg drank with them.”
Stunned, I asked DeCriscio for details.
“I saw her drinking out of a paper coffee cup,” she told me. “I overheard my staff say, ‘I hope Meg didn’t drink all our wine.’ It was wine. She also later admitted to me that she drank with them.”
(I’ve asked Kissinger about this twice via email, but her only reply has been, “Drinking did not factor in the decision.”)
The following week, now assuming they had the adviser’s blessing, the editors didn’t bother with water bottles. DeCriscio says…
“They went to pull out the wine around 7 or 7:30. I asked them to wait until closer to the end of deadline night. They waited an hour. I was pissed that my asking them to wait wasn’t enough. I was pissed that the advisers hadn’t helped me put an end to it after the first incident. I don’t know how much wine they had coming into that night, but they left four large empty bottles in the trash.
DeCriscio isn’t straight-edge or a teetotaler. What infuriated her about the drinking was the shoddy journalism that resulted from it. But at DePauw, the editor-in-chief can’t fire staffers who were hired before her term – and the drinkers were staffers she inherited. So she complained to Kissinger and the publication board. She didn’t feel like her complaint was embraced.
“They called this kumbaya meeting with the editorial board and said, ‘This must stop’ because it’s against university policy,” DeCriscio says. But there was no investigation, punishment, or monitoring. It was never mentioned again.
Interestingly, The DePauw also never mentioned its editor being fired (I mean suspended). DeCriscio finds that amusing.
“I did something so bad that I was fired over it, but what’s worse was that they didn’t follow the SPJ Code of Ethics and report on my firing,” she says. “It was swept under the rug.”
Maybe because under that rug were a lot of empty wine bottles.
In cod we trust.
SMACK likes to win weird. We’re not powerful enough to get a fired editor reinstated at a private university. We can, however, use the school’s own rules to pay for her to go to Manhattan.
Like many schools, DePauw offers grants to its students if they do something above and beyond. So SMACK asked the College Media Association if SPJ could present a session next month at its annual spring convention, just a few blocks from Times Square. We then asked DeCriscio to speak about what happened to her as editor.
Based on that, she applied for, and won, a $600 Student Research & Artistic Grant, plus $500 from The Hubbard Center for Student Engagement.
That’s enough for airfare, cab, hotel, and convention registration. So basically, DePauw is paying for DeCriscio to go to New York City to talk about how she got fired. I mean, suspended.
While she’s there, DeCriscio will interview student journalists about drinking in their own newsrooms – because I doubt The DePauw invented that. Her report will appear on the College Media Watchdog.
We also asked DeCriscio to join the SMACK staff, where she’ll help choose winners of our own cash grants, called The Bayonet Awards. She’s said yes. Why? Just for the halibut.
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February 17th, 2016 at 8:01 am
Yet another tragedy for everyone involved. No one wins when this sort of thing happens. It is important, though, for the editor to get a thorough airing like this, otherwise she goes through life with a stain on her record that shouldn’t be there.
February 17th, 2016 at 10:22 am
Trumped up hit piece short on facts and context and reliant on assumptions and just one source, the “aggrieved” party. Bad journalism tailored to fit a preconceived narrative.
February 17th, 2016 at 10:56 am
I’ve not heard from anyone that I misquoted them. The letter to the “aggrieved” party hasn’t been altered. How is this bad journalism?
February 17th, 2016 at 11:45 am
You give the impression that Kissinger and the student reporters were regularly drinking in the newsroom and it was negatively effecting the quality of their writing. And you implied (outright inferred) that the reason why the editor was reprimanded was to cover that up. To lead the reader to this conclusion the only evidence you present is the account of Decrisco and what she claims she overheard a member of her staff say (an unattributed and unsourced quote). That whole theory fails the smell test.
February 17th, 2016 at 2:59 pm
Absolutely agree with this, and I’ll add that it seems to me that DeCriscio’s actions did, in fact, violate ethics — not just because she gave out sandwiches, but because she outright expresses her religious sympathies for the hate group’s “remarkable testimony.” How could she remain head editor of the publication as long as they would still be reporting on that story throughout the semester? Also, Koretzky and Seaman both ignore the fact that DeCriscio was not in fact fired, but demoted, hardly a “draconian” action.
February 17th, 2016 at 10:14 pm
Nicole was removed as editor. How is that not a firing?
February 17th, 2016 at 10:16 pm
Nicole says Meg Kissinger drank with her students. I asked Kissinger twice if she did. She refused to directly answer the question.
Ad yes, I both implied and inferred. That’s why I called it my theory.
February 18th, 2016 at 9:31 am
Oh so you asked Kissinger twice and she said the fact that she drank once had nothing to do with DeCriscio’s suspension? Then clearly by Occam’s Razor the student editor MUST have been suspended as punishment for speaking out against drinking in the newsroom. Do you also happen to believe that there was a second shooter involved in the Kennedy assassination and that 9/11 was an inside job?
February 18th, 2016 at 2:08 pm
If you push just a bit more and mention Hitler, we’ll have reached a proof of Godwin’s Law.
February 23rd, 2016 at 2:50 pm
She was demoted.
February 23rd, 2016 at 12:37 pm
From what I’ve read in a (admittedly) quick look of Kissinger’s own writings, does she not inject her own tone and opinion into the pieces she writes? She is far from someone who should be throwing stones about opinion in writings. Maybe I’m missing something, but I doubt it. It’s apparent you stepped on some toes Mike.
As for inference and theory, as one sage luminary once said, “If I let go of a hammer on a planet that has a positive gravity, I need not see it fall to know that it has in fact fallen”
Ankle-biters might can ridicule the source, but if they can’t successfully present an opposing argument that the statement is implausible, then they’re just barking and saying nothing.
February 17th, 2016 at 10:18 pm
Can you give me specifics? I quoted Meg accurately (she hasn’t told me I didn’t) and reprinted the letter explaining Nicole’s dismissal. That’s more than “one source.”
February 17th, 2016 at 11:07 am
Hmmm. Seems like ruexperienced6 needs to check his/her math.
The author interviewed three sources and acquired a copy of a letter related to the firing/suspension, also a “source.”
People should be concerned about the trend — putting upon student journalists — not blog posts about it.
And after the Missouri incident, the lack of knowledge among journalism faculty about student press rights and ethical behavior also should raise concerns.
February 17th, 2016 at 11:59 am
The (lack of) sources I am referring to are those documenting the explosive accusation that DeCrisico was suspended as retribution for Kissinger engaging in inappropriate behavior regularly drinking with her students. For that cockamimie theory DeCrisicio is the one and only source.
“People should be concerned about the trend”… That thinking just proves my point. Why let the facts get in the way of a good story (regardless of what damage you can inflict on someone’s reputation) that fits a preconceived narrative that administrations are threatening or censoring student media (the whole point of this blog). It’s editorializing, not reporting.
February 18th, 2016 at 6:44 am
There’s a clear divide between the author’s theory and the sourced theory. Both are backed up with reason. That ain’t editorializing. Your comments, however, are clever in that they call facts into question without presenting facts. Well done.
February 17th, 2016 at 12:05 pm
Garbage article if I have ever read one. And I have!
February 17th, 2016 at 10:23 pm
I’m open to criticism, but this simply tells me your read a lot of garbage. If you have specifics, I’m open to dispassionate debate. See above.
February 17th, 2016 at 2:40 pm
What’s with all the obnoxious wacky fish cartoons?
February 17th, 2016 at 10:24 pm
So they suck, huh? Oh well. I tried. I thought for sure the objections would run more against the puns than the art. Mea culpa.
February 23rd, 2016 at 2:31 pm
There’s nothing wrong with fish puns!
February 18th, 2016 at 5:49 am
This is such a tragedy for Nicole and all of the students involved. What a brave editor — hang in there, Nicole. Can you get someone to live stream the CMA session? Would love to support and listen in.
To all the rude commenters here, have you no decency to support student journalism? Silly fish cartoons aside, at least question the facts and discuss the situation before you slam those involved. I dealt with a lot of shady shit as editor at my school paper in my college days, but this is just horrible all around. Great real world experience… administration and advisers certainly can act a lot like politicians.
February 23rd, 2016 at 8:36 am
Sadly this POS piece has gotten some traction in the blogosphere. Thankfully the truth will come out soon. I’m looking forward to its retraction and the apology from Koretzky and SPJ. That is unless they feel that by publishing this overreaction piece they feel that they are stuck defending their actions.
February 23rd, 2016 at 2:40 pm
How is covering a story at the same time you’re giving food to your subjects not a conflict of interest? Why didn’t she reveal her involvement with the group before she gave herself the assignment? She says they know her.
As far as the drinking thing, it’s utterly unsubstantiated. She’s a disgruntled (cureent employee. MK should sue you and SPJ for libel. Try reporting man.)
I also think it points to your character to cackle about how this University supports the student by funding her to go speak at your bullshit conference, unchallenged, to gripe about the reaction to her ethical misstep. If it’s so important, maybe she could tell the school what she’s doing, and if it means so much, maybe you could pay for the trip. Instead you revel in the fact that you’re stealing their money. You don’t seem to know the first thing about ethics, and you seem to be the one teaching this kid a reprehensible professional conduct.
If she were such a great writer, she might have reported in the on-line post called “the Odyssey” the true the tactics “Brother” Phillip used. This was an attack group, targeting women, carrying vile placrads, screaming sexist epithets and daring the crowd to fight back. No Christians there, though Nicole is certainly ready to give them credit for being just that– all by carefully undrereporting the facts. Try reporting kid. No one at the school tried to stop her from socializing with this bunch, and she received no “disapproval” from anyone, except the editorial board (for misusing her power as editor to slant the coverage). She just shouldn’t have pretended to be covering the story, or using her position as editor to provide herself with a chance to use news coverage in this clearly biased mindset. You don’t feed your new subject.
You aren’t helping her by allowing her to think she’s due the protections she clearly forfeit. Maybe you can hire her as a blogger.