I must object, in the strongest possible terms, to The Post’s story by Alisa Warren, entitled “Chaos leads to arrests” published in the online edition on September 11 at 12:33 am. The story contains numerous distortions and omissions and it gives a false impression of what I saw at the Student Senate meeting. I am the man in the green shirt in the photograph that you used to promote the story.
The way the story describes Sebo’s violation of senate protocol does not make it clear that she was bound by the rules of the senate to wait for the meeting to be called to order before speaking and that she and the other Bobcats for Israel were not attempting to express themselves, so much as attempting to scuttle the meeting. The story reads as if a general melee broke out with fault on both sides. In fact, all of the aggression came from the Bobcats.
Instead of a lead, the story begins with a comparison between the protest at the trustees meeting in 2013 and the Bobcats’ action at the senate meeting. That comparison fails to mention that the protestors at the trustees meeting were arrested within 50 seconds of interrupting the meeting while the Bobcats were allowed two minutes each before being escorted out.
Your failure to analyze the photograph in which I appear, is the most egregious omission in the story. Readers may wonder why my comrades and I are standing in front of the second Bobcat for Israel to interrupt the meeting while he yells his text. Any competent journalist would know that the image calls for a forensic reading. We were there because that BFI was physically intimidating President Marzec. He strode up to Megan Marzec aggressively, and started screaming in her face. He carried himself in a menacing manner. It is widely known that Marzec had received multiple death threats and rape threats from around the country in response to the video in days leading up to the meeting. That man either knew, or should have known, this before behaving in a way that threatened violence against Marzec. Intentionally or not, his actions were an extension of the lethal and sexual threats against her. The story displays unmistakable bias in not mentioning this. It is a serious breach of journalistic ethics. That out of impatience, unprofessionalism, or laziness, Warren did not interview anyone in the incident before filing the story is unacceptable. By leaving that man’s aggression out of the story, The Post has normalized violence against women on a campus where it is an ongoing problem. By not analyzing the photograph, the story harms every woman on campus, and every person vulnerable to violence on campus. This does not speak well for your journalistic training.
Louis-Georges Schwartz is an Associate Professor at Ohio University’s Film Division
