Sorting Through the Mess
Unraveling the Jillian Bandes - DTH Affair
Brian Sopp
September 2005
As most readers are by now aware, Jillian Bandes, a junior majoring in international studies, was fired from The Daily Tar Heel after being accused of misrepresenting sources in one of her columns. The piece in question, “It’s sad, but racial profiling is necessary for our safety,” ran in the DTH on Tuesday, September 13 and featured such opinions as “I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.” Bandes was fired the following afternoon for a “breach of journalistic integrity.”
What readers may not completely understand is why Jillian was fired. It seems that several reasons have been mentioned, but a single concise justification has not been made. The day after Bandes was fired, Chris Coletta, Opinion Editor for the DTH, wrote that Jillian “took source’s words out of context,” and “misled those sources when she conducted interviews.”
Coletta, however, failed to definitively prove either assertion. His justification for the first claim—that Jillian took quotes out of context—was that none of the sources supported racial profiling. “None of them want Arabs to get ‘sexed up’ as they go through the airport,” Coletta wrote. “In other words their quotes were wrong, even if the words were correct.”
Explaining how sources were misled, Coletta wrote, “Racial profiling was in fact part of their conversation. But it wasn’t their entire conversation. At no point did Khaki, Salameh or Nasser ever think that the only quotes Bandes would use would be their comments on the subject.”
So, according to Coletta, not only does a source have the authority to claim misrepresentation when they are embarrassed by what a journalist writes, but the journalist is supposed to promise to use a specified amount of every interview that is conducted.
Bandes told Carolina Review that misrepresenting sources was just an excuse to let her go. After a controversial column criticizing sororities, an inflammatory column on racial-profiling “was the straw that broke the camels back.”
When asked if she thought she misrepresented sources, Bandes told The Review, “No! I definitely did not misquote them.” Bandes claims to have told all her sources that she was doing an article about Arabs in the post-Sept. 11 world and racial profiling. “As the story developed it became more about profiling,” she said.
Bandes admitted to “exaggerating” and writing an inflammatory column, but “Obviously, Arab students and professors don’t want to be sexed up,” she said. “By no means was what I did grounds for getting kicked off the staff.”
However, Elliot Dube, Public Editor for the DTH, told The Review that the firing “did not set a new precedent for how the DTH handles things.” While Opinion Editor, Dube was suspended for one week for hiring a columnist that was planning to serve as a student government appointee. A former staffer, Cleve Wootsen, was once suspended for socializing with people that he would have to write about. So, according to Dube, Bandes’ firing is consistent with the DTH’s historically hard-line.
Furthermore, Dube gave The Review a much clearer justification for firing Bandes than Coletta was able to offer the public. According to Dube, Bandes’ juxtaposition of the sentences, “I want Arabs to get sexed up like nothing else,” and “Arab students at UNC don’t seem to think that’s such a bad idea” is problematic. Referring to the sources, Dube said, “These people have grounds for severe complaint. It is within the realm of possibility to infer that they think being sexed up is ok.” Such an interpretation puts sources in a “false light,” he said.
But if someone could possibly think that the sources in the column supported Bandes’ inflammatory statements, why did the column make it to print? According to Dube, when an article is written by a DTH reporter, it is edited by an Assistant desk editor, the desk editor, a member of management, and finally a copyeditor.
Usually columns do not have to be fact checked because they lie in the realm of pure opinion. But obviously this column contained more than just opinion. “Chris made a huge mistake,” Dube said. “He was negligent.”
In an attempt to end the discussion of the Bandes debacle, and put readers’ concerns to rest, DTH Editor, Ryan Tuck wrote a column on September 19 entitled, “It’s time we moved on.” In the column he explained that “Opinion Editor Chris Coletta will not work for us for the next week — a decision that reflects our own culpability in the incident and also serves as another tool to help this circus cool down.”
The problem with Coletta’s week of vacation is that Tuck failed to define the nature of his “culpability.” In fact he defended Coletta when writing, “I come down on the side of trust — that we have to trust our staffers to bring us the correct information in the fairest way.” So why then was Coletta suspended? Could it have been an effort to quell the controversy?
In addition, Tuck’s “final statement on the details of the situation” once again confuse the reasons behind Bandes’ firing. “Bandes was let go because she violated the two things we value most as a newspaper,” Tuck wrote.
“Her column was gathered inaccurately and, because of poor quote selection and placement in the body of the article, her column was an inaccurate reflection of her sources.”
Interestingly, Dube’s column explaining the controversy focused on how Bandes misrepresented quotes, while Tuck, insists that Bandes’ “column was gathered inaccurately.” Such a statement is much more subtle than Coletta’s view that Bandes “lied to her sources and readers,” but it remains an assertion that cannot be proven.
It seems quite possible that the Bandes controversy developed so quickly that the DTH leadership did not know which way was up. And thus, they left their readership with a number of unanswered questions. Why was Bandes fired? How was Chris Coletta culpable? And if he was culpable, is a one week suspension a real punishment?
Unfortunately, readers were left without clear answers. And without such answers the only thing they are certain of is their agreement with what Dube told The Review. “I think the DTH deserves to look bad,” he said. “More than one person made a mistake here.”