The dismissal of conservative opinion columnist Jillian Bandes from the University of North Carolina’s (UNC) student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, last week came amidst controversy over an inflammatory opinion column she wrote about Arabs.
“I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport,” Bandes began the column. “It’s sad, but racial profiling is necessary for our safety.”
A day after the release of her column, Bandes was fired from the newspaper-not because her piece was offensive, according to senior editors at the paper, but because she allegedly misled sources and cited them out of context.
In a press release issued last Friday, Ryan C. Tuck, editor-in-chief of the Daily Tar Heel, said, “we did not dismiss her [Bandes] for the content of her column, though it appears that many people would like to think that we did. We did not dismiss her for personal reasons or in an effort to avoid further public outrage. We dismissed Bandes because she did not make the purpose of the piece clear to her sources and because she strung together quotes and statements in a way that misrepresented the opinions of those sources. Her column reflected poor journalistic values.”
Bandes interviewed two students and one professor for her column and all
claim she misled them about her topic.
“I was disappointed with the article because my quotes were taken out of context and I was disappointed that Jillian would go as far as telling me that she would be writing an article about Arab-American relations post-9/11 and then she would write a few paragraphs on racial profiling. That wasn’t something I was aware of when she was doing the interview,” said one student quoted in Bandes’ article, junior information science major Sherief Khaki. “She made it look like I agreed with racial profiling.”
The other student Bandes interviewed, Muhammad Salameh, a junior biology major and active member of the UNC Muslim community, expressed embarrassment at being included in Bandes’ column. He said that he even received hate mail in the column’s aftermath, since Bandes made Salameh appear to support racial profiling.
“She made me look so stupid on campus,” Salameh said. “I’m trying to break stereotypes and promote multiculturalism, but she made me look like I was bashing my own people.”
The main problem Bandes’ editors pointed to stems from the use of “that” in her column’s statement regarding airport searches: “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.” According to Elliot Dube, the Daily Tar Heel’s public editor, in an article the newspaper published last Friday, “that” in the second sentence refers to the idea expressed in the first sentence. Following this statement in her article are the quotes from the three students interviewed. Because Bandes’ three sources claim they completely disagree with the view expressed in the article’s first sentence, and the use of “Arab” in the second sentence refers to them, they say Bandes is suggesting that their quotations support her views.
The column has caused widespread outrage and has garnered attention from national media outlets, including The Washington Times and The Associated Press. According to Tuck, the reaction to this column is unprecedented for his newspaper.
“My inbox is a veritable mountain of letters and I have been unable to attend class all week because of the amount of online feedback-now well more than 1,000 posts-that have needed to be moderated,” he wrote in a column published Monday in the Daily Tar Heel.
One such response came from the Muslim Students Association at UNC. In their letter published in the Daily Tar Heel, group members Uzma Khan and Bushra Bhatti wrote, “our main criticism of Bandes’ article is not in what it argues but the way she argues her point so disrespectfully…it offended us all within the same sentence. The image of naked Arabs in a public airport is not only truly horrifying, but it is also reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib photos where Iraqis were also ‘stripped’ down for information about terrorists.”
Bandes defended her article in a letter to the Daily Tar Heel last Friday.
“[W]hat I did was not journalistically out of bounds. My sources agreed with racial profiling and I simply added my two cents…I’m apologizing for offending people who didn’t deserve to be disrespected, but I stand my ground in that there was a severe lack of judgment in my removal from the paper.”
Senior editors at the Tar Heel claim that Bandes is not the only party deserving of blame. Daily Tar Heel Opinion Editor Chris Coletta asked Bandes if she had fairly represented her sources before the column was printed. When she replied affirmatively, Coletta made no further inquiry until after the controversy erupted. After investigating Bandes’ research, they concluded that she had misrepresented her sources and gathered her information in a misleading manner.
“Micromanaging our staffers, but assuring that red flags check out, is a tight line to walk. 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,” Tuck wrote in an op-ed piece Monday.
Margaret Bauer, the editor-in-chief of Student Life, weighed in on the controversial decisions editors face about what should be published.
“We would want to run [Bandes’ column], but we might want to ask if the quotes are in context,” Bauer said. “I would probably print it. It’s her opinion and it doesn’t reflect upon the views of the paper. Op-eds are the opinions of the writers. They in no way reflect upon Student Life. If they want to say that, [even if] it’s potentially very offensive, that’s free speech, and that’s the point of Forum, to air potentially unpopular opinions.”