There is a reason The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post don’t produce April Fools’ issues. Readers’ trust is hard to build and easy to shatter. No matter the intention, satirical or joke pieces in a newspaper that generally reports news and offers opinion on matters of the day, is a risky proposition. The risk of offending or alienating those who read or look to the paper for fair, balanced coverage is high. What some might think is funny others will see as offensive.
The Managing Board of The Cavalier Daily made a bad decision when they chose to publish at least two articles in their April Fools’ issue. The “ABC officers tackle Native American student outside Bodo’s Bagels” and “Zeta Psi hosts ‘Rosa Parks’ party” articles were in poor taste and exacerbated stereotypes. I imagine that the Managing Board and the writers and editors involved in both pieces thought they were satirizing many of the various issues that have been raised in the wake of the several disturbing and horrific events that have occurred near U.Va. recently. Intent, though, doesn’t make up for offending people and trivializing their experiences.
What is worse than just the problematic articles is that the print edition of the April Fools issue supplanted one of the normal print issues of The Cavalier Daily. Having cut back to only two print issues per week to save money, it is concerning that one of those issues was a joke/satire issue.
Local news picked up the story on the April Fool’s issue with TV stations NBC 29 and CBS 19 both posting articles and garnering many comments.
It wasn’t only a local issue, though. The public editor for the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, retweeted a Poynter news story about The Cavalier Daily articles entitled “When April Fools’ Day goes wrong.”
Following some backlash, the Managing Board of The Cavalier Daily deleted the articles from the website and pulled the PDF copy of the print edition. After that they published an apology online.The apology was less than ideal. The Managing Board wrote, in part:
“The April Fools edition is meant to start a conversation and provide satirical commentary on important issues. The April Fools edition is not meant to come at the expense of our peers. We neglected to foresee that these pieces would come across as the latter, and for that, we regret their publication.”
This ends up reading as something on the order of “we’re sorry if you were offended.” “Neglected to foresee that these pieces would come across as the latter. . .” seems to put the onus on those who read it in a way different than it was intended. When reading the pieces, though, I’m not sure how else anyone would have interpreted them. There is already a conversation happening in and around the University about race, victimization, power and privilege. The April Fools issue didn’t need to start or encourage that conversation. Satire is certainly an accepted form of humor and an effective form of pointing out positions of power or privilege but these stories didn’t feel like satire so much as slightly altered retellings of recent stories.
The Cavalier Daily strives to be a voice for students at the University of Virginia. They are independent financially and editorially from the University and that gives them a special place from which to write both news and opinion. It also gives them a tremendous burden of trust and a duty to not squander that special place. The April Fools edition of The Cavalier Daily squandered that trust. It was not at all careful of the students and others who read the paper. In an effort to be funny, the people who read the paper were forgotten and when that happens the end product suffers.
The Cavalier Daily staff has damaged the trust readers had in the paper. The main point of the paper is to be an independent voice at the University of Virginia. The paper can’t be that if no one trusts it and if no one is paying attention. The April Fools edition of the paper has done harm to the Cavalier Daily and to its readers.
I’d like to hear from you about what The Cavalier Daily can do to start earning that trust back.
Christopher Broom is the Public Editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at c.broom@cavalierdaily.com or on Twitter at @CDPublicEditor.
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