Posted on 11/01/2001 5:21:16 PM PST by NativeNewYorker
On the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 18, Jean Ryan headed home after putting in a full day at The Oneida (N.Y.) Daily Dispatch. In a newsroom with seven employees and one unfilled vacancy, the managing editor of the 7,000-circulation daily had been working almost around the clock to cover the attacks of Sept. 11.
"From Sept. 11 to Sept. 18, I literally was in the office more than I was home," Ryan said.
She left the newsroom in the hands of city editor Dale Seth, a 13-year veteran of the Dispatch, whom she had just assigned to work the night shift. Before she left, she asked Seth to write an unsigned editorial for the next afternoon's paper.
The resulting piece argued for restraint instead of retaliation in the Middle East. But in its 534 words, the editorial addressed a wide range of other topics: local opinions on talk radio, the founding of Israel, the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and potential U.S. casualties from a military action in Afghanistan. Seth titled the piece, "What Are We Getting Into?"
If only he and Ryan could have known the answer. One month later, they would both be fired due to fallout from the article.
"I didn't write this," said Ryan. "I wish I had stayed late and written an editorial myself, because then I would still be working."
* * *
Initial reports of the firings raised more questions than they answered. No one involved was talking, and the editorial and clarification were removed from the paper's website. Many of the principals declined to be interviewed on the record for this story. However, several people involved in the events surrounding the firings have corroborated the following account.
The story that emerges from these interviews is that of a small newsroom in which employees routinely worked late to compete with bigger dailies nearby.
As an afternoon paper, editors knew they could beat the Utica and Syracuse newspapers by having the latest wire stories. If news broke, as it did so often on Sept. 11 and the days afterward, that often meant staying up all night.
When Ryan arrived at the paper in April to boost the newspaper's flagging circulation, she also tried to improve the paper by running staff editorials for the first time in years. The staff was hard-pressed to find time to write the editorials, so Ryan wound up writing almost all of them herself.
On Sept. 19, Ryan received a phone call from an Oneida resident incensed over the editorial that Seth had written. Local attorney Randy Schaal wanted to meet with the editorial board to discuss the issue.
"I felt that if they met with me, I could demonstrate that perhaps the author of the article did not mean to write what was written and did not mean for it to be read the way it was written," Schaal said.
Ryan declined the offer. "I was told that they would not meet with me, that if they met with everyone who disagreed with an editorial, they would never get a paper out," Schaal said. Ryan suggested that Schaal write a letter to the editor. According to Ryan, Schaal said he was too upset at that point to write a letter.
"If you ask any one person, everybody is going to tell you that first of all you have the constitutional right to print what you want to print," Schaal told Poynter.org. "If you're going to put it under the masthead… you also have the moral obligation that those should be views that are morally correct. And if they're not, the community has the right to speak out."
"This is something we could have seen written last century over in Germany," Schaal said.
Ryan did not see the editorial the same way. Said Schaal: "I think (her) words were that she was insulted that I would even think it was anti-Semitic."
She still seems flabbergasted by the charge. "I would never have printed anything that was intentionally anti-Semitic," she said. "I saw this as an attempt to get people to see the innocent people over there [in the Middle East]."
She added: "It would be nice to have a big editorial board, it would be nice to discuss everything before it goes on the page. But doing the amount of work we did, there wasn't an awful lot of time... If I wasn't working 16 hours a day, I would have said, 'Sure, Randy, come in.'"
* * *
Schaal did write a letter to the editor, but first he gathered other opinions about the editorial "to make sure that I wasn't overreacting," he said. He also sent copies of the editorial to other offices, including those of U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.) and the Anti-Defamation League, a non-profit organization that combats anti-Semitism.
The paper's management decided it was time to respond publicly. On Friday, Oct. 5, Ryan and Dispatch publisher Ann Campanie sat down to craft a clarification of the editorial. Chuck Pukanecz, vice president of news from the paper's parent Journal Register Co., reviewed the copy, and the two sides traded versions into the evening.
Finally, the clarification was approved for the Monday edition, which would appear with letters to the editor from Schaal, Oneida mayor Jim Chappell, Boehlert, and the ADL.
By Sunday, a United States-led coalition had begun bombing Afghanistan, and an editorial urging restraint no longer made sense. So Ryan headed back to the office after midnight to change the end of the clarification editorial once more.
"I said to the publisher, it doesn't explain anything and it's not going to satisfy anyone," she said.
* * *
The clarification certainly didn't satisfy Schaal, who said it clarified nothing. He took his case to a higher authority.
Schaal sent copies of the editorial, the clarification, and the letters published on Oct. 8 to the president of the Journal Register Co., along with a statement saying he didn't believe the clarification addressed the issue. What he wanted instead was a retraction and an apology.
The following week, Schaal received word that the newspaper wanted to meet with him.
Pukanecz journeyed to Oneida, primarily to attend the Oct. 17 meeting with Schaal. He and Campanie had also written an apology to run in the paper, and they showed it to Ryan, who approved it. Then they took the apology into the meeting.
Schaal was joined by two representatives from the Jewish Community Federation of Mohawk Valley, and a retired military engineer. Pukanecz and Campanie offered their apologies, and showed the retraction and apology to the visitors. Minor changes were made to the copy.
The final version went much further than the original clarification. "We understand many felt [the editorial] expressed anti-Semitic sentiments," it said. "We will not further offend our readers by attempting in any way to justify what was written; we can only assure readers that The Dispatch is not anti-Semitic and that we acknowledge the editorial should not have been published."
After the meeting, Campanie summoned Ryan and Seth into her office and fired them. Ryan said she was told that the newspaper "no longer trusted my judgment." Seth declined to comment for this story and Campanie would not discuss the firing, so it is unclear what reason was given for Seth's dismissal.
The Oneida Daily Dispatch had just lost its two top editors.
* * *
Two weeks after her dismissal, Ryan still is unsure how the firing came about. "What went on in that meeting? Who demanded what? I have no idea," she said. "I don't think they should have fired anybody… I can understand if the intent had been really hateful, but it wasn't."
But Schaal says he never suggested that anyone be fired over the story, and that the issue never came up in the meeting.
"I regret that two people lost their jobs over this," he said. "All I ever looked for was a retraction and an apology, and originally I would have been mollified had I been able to sit down with the editorial board and talk about how abhorrent it was."
Ultimately, the Journal Register Co. says, the decision belonged to Campanie.
"It is the policy of this newspaper to not discuss specific personnel issues publicly," she said in a statement. "In general, however, as publisher I need to have confidence in the decision-making abilities and judgment of newsroom personnel."
For Ryan, the ordeal is far from over, and she says her future may not involve newspapers.
"I've been in journalism a long time and I have always enjoyed a very fine reputation, and now I feel like my reputation has been soiled," she said. "I'm an excellent copy editor, but do I think I could get another job in this industry? I'm not sure."
-------------
Editorial in question follows:
[This unsigned editorial ran in the Sept. 19 edition of The Oneida Daily Dispatch.]
A search within one's mind and heart to find a reason for the deaths of so many innocent people in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks on the United States leaves on feeling empty and no closer to an answer.
The feeling of many Americans was voiced quite eloquently by Westwood One's radio talk-show host Jim Bohannon early Tuesday morning when he said he wanted the people involved with these attacks dead, including anyone in the countries that sponsor such acts, and the first on his list was the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan, who may now be sheltering the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden.
Some have called for the leveling of Afghanistan's capital. President George W. Bush said: "We will smoke them out of their holes," referring to bin Laden's propensity for holing up in caves.
All of that sounds good to hearts torn by last week's attacks.
But there is a reason in the minds and hearts of the terrorist. It may even be just, though it certainly could not justify such ghastly attacks on unarmed civilians.
A Pakistani who deplored the attacks on New York and Washington, yet swears allegiance to the Taliban, was asked who was responsible, then, for the attacks. He said: "The Jews."
The fact is that in many areas of the Middle East it is believed that history has taught them to carry out such acts.
Until 1948, there was no Israel. The United Nations took Palestinian land and gave it to a number of Jewish terrorists to rule -- Jewish terrorists who had bombed and killed Palestinians and others in an effort to force hands of power to see an Israel formed. Today's freedom fighter, in many cases, was yesterday's terrorist.
Old Testament writings in the Christian Bible speak of the Israelis of that day roaming the desert and often slaughtering the local populations wherever their travels took them, all on God's say-so, of course, but not endearing themselves in the hearts of the Arabs who inhabited that part of the world.
We can succumb to the cry for vengeance and run into war screaming the battle cry, but the harsh reality is that we will then watch on the evening news as the youth of our nation, our sons and daughters, our grandchildren, our high school friends, again come home in body bags.
Or we can take the higher road. It will take cool heads and great minds to determine just where that higher ground is and to approach it in such a way as to see some degree of success, but it is there, somewhere.
The United States, through its close association with Israel since its inception, has now been dragged kicking and screaming right into the middle of that centuries-old Middle Eastern conflict. From that position, it would behoove that party in the middle to consider the hearts of the warring parties. Neither can be simply beat into submission.
Peace in the Middle East would end much of the terrorism. That peace has been hard to come by, but there may be a way yet.
In the words of John Lennon, "Give peace a chance."
So, to extend your analogue here, will the bomber(s) of the disco get a Nobel Peace Prize in, say, 50 years?
E.g., As Weston (ABC News Prez) said (and then refuted) ... WTC Towers versus Pentagon as targets ... and the "sides" there are???
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.