An open letter regarding the Guardian’s coverage of the Price Center Suspected Arson
Regarding the Guardian’s coverage of the Dec. 3 Price Center fires, our editorial board felt the need to address concerns over our practices and methods employed to report and comment on the story in our news and opinion sections.
First, the Guardian Editorial Board is issuing a full retraction of our editorial piece, “Fighting Fire,” which appeared in print and online on Feb. 13, 2014. The piece unfairly implies that the suspects necessarily started the fires in Price Center. The Fifth, Sixth and 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution provide the right to a fair, speedy trial without partiality, and that the presumption of innocence is guaranteed to all accused of a crime. These rights were unjustly disregarded in our editorial piece, as we unfairly associated motives perceived by police as fact and suspects as guilty parties. The piece has been removed from the Guardian’s website, and we are formally disassociating our editorial board, and the entire newspaper, with the piece and ourselves.
While the piece overall is unfair and poorly worded, we maintain our stance that arson, particularly when it threatens the safety of students, staff and faculty on campus, is wrong and never justified. It is unfortunate that this message, aimed at whoever actually set the fires, was lost among premature accusations, assumptions and associations in this piece.
Some comments from our readers have inaccurately identified the Guardian’s Editor in Chief, Ms. Laira Martin, as the sole author of the editorial piece. The Guardian’s Editorial Board policy, which appears alongside editorials weekly in our print edition, attributes editorials to the entire editorial board, as our pieces represent the opinion of a simple majority of the editorial board, following a vote. Our website’s current settings attribute all stories to Ms. Martin by default, and in this case, the attribution was an error that should have been corrected before the piece was published. The by-line was changed as soon as the mistake came to our attention.
Our editorial board and news section staff maintains that the front-page news coverage was fair. At no point did our news story assume the suspects were guilty, and the story correctly attributed accusations and perceived motives to appropriate sources. On that note, we would like to address some of the content of the article to clarify our news coverage:
San Diego County Crime Stoppers, the agency that published the surveillance footage on YouTube and wrote a public, Feb. 7 media release on the events, is a private organization that logs anonymous tips of potential crimes and reports them to county and city policing authorities. While the Guardian is not mandated to explain the nature of organizations used as sources on our news pages, we felt that in this instance, our coverage would have been augmented by including more information about the San Diego County Crime Stoppers’ involvement in the case.
Our news section staff failed to contact the suspects for comment at any point before we published the story, and we acknowledge that it would have behooved our news staff to reach out to the suspects for comment. We learned of Nguyen’s Feb. 7 arraignment after it had already occurred and therefore failed to send a reporter to cover it. Both of these would have lent our story more journalistic integrity.
The still image of the suspects, which came from surveillance video footage that accompanied the story in our print edition, was provided to us by Los Angeles Times reporter Tony Perry and did not violate any journalism ethics or protocols. He received the footage from San Diego County Crime Stoppers. The same images can be found on several other news websites, including Fox 5 San Diego, the Los Angeles Times and NBC 7. Although the image is widely available to the public, we should have sourced where we obtained the image in our print edition.
A paragraph that noted that one of the suspects pleaded not guilty should have appeared at the beginning of the story, though its inclusion in the story satisfies reporting standards.
We apologize for the unfairness in our editorial piece, and we hope that feedback from our readership on all of our coverage will continue to improve our reporting, our professionalism and our ability to serve the UCSD community as the campus voice for students.
Sincerely,
The UCSD Guardian Editorial Board