UPDATE: Daily editor stipends — 13 editors each get $2,320

I recently found a couple interesting emails to dailywatch@gmail.com that accidentally went to the spam folder [March 13-14]. One writer had issues with a remark I made in this post, regarding the stipends The McGill Daily’s editors received in comparison to The McGill Tribune’s stipends.

I emailed Byron Tau (who wrote the Trib article on the alleged copying of other articles’ text by The Daily’s Features editor) to find out the Tribune’s stipends. Tau tells me

The budget changes, but most of hte section editors make 250 a semester. News makes 300. Managing and ed in chief make a lot more, but I don’t know how much. We also get bonuses depending on how well the Trib does — and I’m not sure the amounts.

That means that most Tribune editors get $500 per year, disregarding potential bonuses. They publish only once a week, unlike The Daily, but they don’t have a wire service, which The Daily uses every issue.

The guy who emailed me was an editor for The Daily. Last year, he says regular editors got $290 per MONTH. With eight months of publication, that means that most [13] of the editors of The Daily each got $2320 per year. The editors [4] of a few smaller sections, such as Mind & Body, get half that much.

The amount of the stipend has never been on the Daily Publication Society’s website or been published in the newspaper or mentioned on The Daily’s blogs, before or after any referendum votes on The Daily’s funding… Is that supposed to be “non-hierarchal” ?

Kael gets a shout-out

John Semley in The Tribune writes a little piece on the great Pauline Kael, whom he calls “the cure for film criticism.” The American director Jonathan Demme once said,

If you’re a filmmaker, you read what Pauline Kael says about you, and you read it in a certain way. I’ve had my mind changed on several occasions by her. She has a point of view, an artistry that’s extraordinary for a film enthusiast [to read]. When The New Yorker comes out and you see that, by God, she likes your movie, it’s a spectacular feeling, and you read it over and over. When she doesn’t like your movie, you read that one only once.

Kael was also responsible for a general change in writing style at The New Yorker, which in turn helped to expand the possibilities of culture writing at other major publications.

Semley quotes Kael about the role of the critic. I wish I could find this interview I remember in which she spoke directly about that, but if I can expand on Semley’s quote from her essay Circles & Squares, which she wrote to compare well to the formal film criticism the essay was discussing:

The role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work, what is in it that shouldn’t be, what is not in it that could be. He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the work than they could see for themselves; he is a great critic, if by his understanding and feeling for the work, by his passion, he can excite people so that they want to experience more of the art that is there, waiting to be seized. The art of the critic is to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others.

Semley mentions A.O. Scott, David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek, as her critical prodigy, although the list could go on (especially if you’re not buzzed by those reviewers), and includes Roger Ebert, the most commercially influential movie reviewer today. Among directors, she was friends with both Jean Renoir and Sam Peckinpah, two great directors almost as different as you can get. It’s a good piece by Semley and nice to see in a university newspaper toward the end of a year.

If the Public Editor’s going to write about “Sparing the Rich” again, he might mention another article with intentional copying

Someone points out to me that this Daily article, by ex-Features editor Martin Lukacs, from the spring before last evidently got some “textual inspiration” from this article in The Guardian five months before. Right now, the last section of The Daily article stands out to me as having similarities to The Guardian piece by Robert Reiner. The clearest example is that Reiner writes in The Guardian:

Sir Ian’s basic question, “What kind of police service do we want?” cannot be considered in isolation from the question of the kind of society we have and want. Policing is a symbol, not a source, of the character of a civilisation.

And the ex-Features editor writes in his concluding lines:

By shifting the terms on which we think about policing and crime, we take the first step towards ensuring real security in the future. The question of what kind of police service we want cannot be answered in isolation from the question of what kind of society we have and want.

The Guardian is not credited at all, and the copying is obviously intentional. I find it hard to believe that the writer wasn’t aware that people would see this as plagiarism.

There are also some smaller bits of identical text. But ignoring the identical text, other aspects of the article — such as taking Reiner’s use of a quote from the novel The Long Goodbye and some analysis similar to Reiner’s — would make a situation analogous to, though worse than, the one The Harvard Crimson had, for which they discontinued the author’s column and printed an immediate retraction.

There’s no retraction yet for actions of the guy whom they replaced with James McNultey and now Omar Little from the cable show The Wire …

Walzer’s suggestion about sending mercenaries to stop the slaughter in Darfur wasn’t as radical as it seemed

Following up on this post, I just saw, via Matt Yglesias’ blog, that someone has pointed out that “private contractors” are already used for refugee security:

In Kenya, ArmorGroup guards protect UNHCR refugee camps; PAE and AYR Aviation are working with the UN and African Union in Sudan; in Liberia, Dyncorp is training that country’s new military. Moreover, no one, including the contractors themselves, are advocating that Blackwater or any other private group should go into Darfur with guns blazing. I have yet to come across any serious player in the industry who is advocating a combat role for private contractors. In fact, quite the opposite.

Blackwater offered to guard villages and refugee camps, as its mission.

Indeed, in last week’s WSJ, Peter Charles Choharis, a former UNICEF relief worker called for the use of private contractors in Darfur, operating under the following criteria:

The Security Council should consider employing contract armed forces to protect civilians and relief workers. These forces would have a very limited mandate to create safe havens for civilians, and would operate only until traditional U.N. peacekeepers can takeover. Because they would be authorized by the Security Council, would not directly take part in hostilities, and would use force only when necessary to protect innocent civilians and relief workers, they would not be mercenaries, which are prohibited by international law.

Private forces could also act as a humanitarian force-multiplier. Protected by these forces, NGOs will be able to provide food, water, medical treatment and shelter much more quickly, thereby saving countless more lives. Beyond supplies, providing security to vulnerable civilians can help avert traumas like rape and mutilation that can scar entire societies and make national reconciliation more difficult.

Daily wins referendum with an 80% YES vote

It’s not on The Daily’s website yet, but it’s on The Tribune’s. As expected, The McGill Daily will not have difficulty planning its budget next year or producing two print issues per week, which would have been the result of a NO vote.

… No word yet on whether The McGill Tribune will be able to survive the mighty lawsuit threatened by the Coordinating Editor of The Daily, when The Tribune endorsed a YES vote for the social good called a free press.

[ UPDATE: Election results are up on The Daily's website now. Their news story quotes the current student rep who was the Features editor for last year's inexplicable "Jewish Like Me" piece:

DPS Board of Directors member Jeremy Delman said he hoped the support for The Daily’s existence evidenced in Friday’s results would convince the administration that a follow-up referendum in five years’ time is unnecessary.

... Not very comforting to hear from a student rep if you're a believer in voting rights, since Delman doesn't say votes should take place every 8 years or 10 or whatever.

As though trying to outdo himself in audaciousness, here Delman writes a Hyde Park called "Yes to Accountability, no to neverendums," in which he uses variations of the word "accountability" to refer to a principle that instead comes under the word "inclusivity."

Delman waxes on with the usual line about how the content of The Daily can change by its getting volunteers with more diverse opinions (that is, if group pressures in the EdBoard don't conveniently dissuade them from fully participating, or at all). Delman's incorrect use of the word "accountability" throughout the piece is either Orwellian nonsense, or an embarrassing confusion of language by a former editor. ]

Coordinating Editor of The Daily threatened … to sue … The Tribune

It looks more like ego bias than a substantive argument, if we draw on the account of Byron Tau, the Opinion Editor of The McGill Tribune (and the writer of the story on the alleged plagiarism in The Daily). I have permission to quote him:

Drew Nelles contacted me by e-mail immediately after our affirmative endorsement went to print, threatening legal action (on a charge of libel), and saying that he was outraged and shocked that we didn’t contact him for his side of the story. I told him that were perfectly capable of reading and interpreting the DPS constitution ourselves, and that we didn’t necessarily need to tell his side of the story in our op-ed section. Further, I said that we’d provide him whatever column space he, or the Daily, or the DPS wanted in order to draft a reply or debate the issue in public. The crux of his complaint was that he was angry that we accused him of “lying” (which we never did…we merely took issue with how he represented the DPS constitution in the press). I pointed out that what we wrote was an almost exact paraphrase of what appeared in the Gazette, so I’m not exactly sure what his complaint is. I haven’t hear a follow up from him or the Daily since, except for the DPS Hyde Park that appeared today.

So The Tribune supports The Daily in the referendum based on the desirability of a free and competitive press — or in the language of the YES vote, “a free and critical press [which] is essential to a vibrant campus society and a healthy democracy” — and Nelles returns this support by threatening a lawsuit and attempting to squelch serious criticism by the press? … The Daily is the anti-establishment newspaper, right?

I don’t understand this libel accusation against The Tribune, except as a product of Nelles’ blind range. After I read their endorsement, I assumed some people at The Tribune agreed with me that Nelles made a mistake and did not responsibly correct or clarify himself in time for the students to have the full facts when voting. I myself didn’t accuse Nelles of lying. I even emailed him to give him the chance to “clarify or correct,” three or four days before I posted.

This looks like another situation where a recourse to victimhood trumps The Daily’s Coordinating Editor’s taking responsibility for his words and actions — and sometimes taking a hit in deference to the ideals of journalism.

Maybe Nelles simply freaked, but The Tribune’s criticism of Nelles’ remarks seems to have pressured other members on the Board of The Daily to (mis)read a whole Article’s worth of meaning into one line of The Daily’s Constitution, 16(4a). (That line only tells us that if a student gets any bright ideas, he/she should know that they can’t try to force a referendum by going to the top electoral officer.) Nelles’ outrage may have somehow pushed many on the Board toward an interpretation of The Daily’s Constitution based on isolating one line from the rest of the document.

In 1986, the students had referenda rights, to the extent that they could oust an editor. We don’t have those today. Now we can vote to refuse a fee increase, and the University lets us vote every 5 years, when we can take into account The Daily’s pluses (mostly certain writers, illustrators, photographers, etc.) and minuses, the biggest one being the lack of accountability relative to other independent student newspapers.

[UPDATE 5/16/08: After the mini-controversy about this, including Nelles' threat to sue, the Daily decided to reform the Constitution to allow for referenda in situations other than fee increases -- but this was after the last issue for 2007-2008. ]

______________

I’m not in favor of getting back referenda rights to the extent that we could decide when an editor had crossed the line and should go, but what would we do with those rights if we had them today?

• Before reading week, the Coordinating Editor’s Op-Ed told us that he didn’t publish any note alerting the reader about “Sparing the Rich” because they were following a lawyer’s advice. But a lawyer advising Nelles about what a court could consider copyright infringement certainly didn’t advise him about his editorial responsibilities.

• We were told nothing about Lukacs being pushed out even though Nelles’s Op-Ed told us the newspaper was committed to being upfront with us about the plagiarism question.

• And though Nelles and the other editors pushed Lukacs out to solve a problem supposedly, they didn’t feel we deserved an Errata for Lukacs’ transcribing of a podcast without attribution to the original source and without indications he made large-scale adaptations of the participants’ words. Although the Ethics section of The Constitution says “The editors must rectify errors, in print, at the first available opportunity,” that rule was apparently suspended because a voting period was coming up and then because we were in the middle of it.

All the while, the YES Committee has been telling us that “a ‘no’ vote will mean the termination of all undergraduate student fees for the McGill Daily and Le Délit and will result in the end of their publication.” They got that language into the referendum, and made that their main pitch to the students, instead of saying what Board member Max Reed told CKUT, more accurately, and what other DPS Board members said from time to time: that it would be really damn hard to do budget planning in order to publish.

I understand that people were getting super stressed as the referendum was coming, but none of the above speaks to the editors’ willingness to accept responsibility or the other higher-ups’ willingness to give us transparency. The big vote should ideally demand more responsibility and transparency from a journalist, not the opposite.

There should be trust in the students that they can make the right decision when they have all the information. Instead, it looks like the punctuation to the students’ YES is the Coordinating Editor’s feeling so powerfully about getting us to read the Constitution so that his wayward remarks appeared perfectly fine, he wanted to sue another newspaper that gave The Daily an endorsement.

Hey, Hillel members, these guys are much hipper and more righteous than you

Letters like this are not what you’re supposed to sign when you’ve been writing/editing stories (Dave Gruber, Simon Lewsen, Martin Lukacs) relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or might want to write/edit them in the near future (Max Halperin).

They can get that from many journalistic codes of ethics, including the SPJ’s, which states that

Journalists should [...] — Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.

Or closer to home, the ethics code of the Canadian Association of Journalists states:

We will not participate in demonstrations or sign petitions if there could be an appearance of conflict with our role as fair and impartial journalists.

Or they can take the advice of Amanda McCuaig, President of The Daily’s own news organization, the Canadian University Press (CUP). She mentioned to me in an email a while back:

Really though, avoid writing news on something you’re too close to. Features, opinions, etc are fine, just be sure to let the reader know.

Besides the issue of journalistic integrity and conflict of interest, there’s a phrase in the letter that seems to forswear all “Israeli military invasions or embargoes of Gaza,” as though under any circumstances. The people at the left-wing Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz would not be impressed.

(And columnist Bradley Burston might share with them his sad but realistic assessment of Israel’s alternatives, “Nine immoral solutions for Gaza — a guide.”)

But since they’ve already crossed a line for journalists, to advertise themselves as good humanists, I assume they’re writing a similar letter in response to

• the virtually daily firing of qassam rockets into Sderot; the recent firing of grad missiles into Ashekelon, which killed a university student;
• Hamas’ violation of their under-the-table ceasefire with Israel after 5 [CORRECTION: 4] days;
• Hamas’ recent admission that they have been sending large amounts of fighters to Iran for training; and the recent shooting spree at a yeshiva in Jerusalem that killed eight.

This deliberate killing of young teenagers at the yeshiva was praised by representatives from all major Palestinians political factions, including some from the “more moderate” Fatah. But the act was condemned unequivocally and without relativism by one Kuwaiti (!) newspaper, which did not align the Israeli military’s firing at rocket squads that operate near civilians with Palestinian attacks on civilians. The Kuwaiti op-ed rejected the “cycle of violence” argument that underlies the letter with The Daily signatories.

… On the other hand, The Daily has responsibly appended the Errata to the online copy of one of the articles in which the signatories had a hand. I don’t think they did so before they printed my letter referring readers to the post about errors in the Rachel-Corrie-and-Anne-Frank-are-soul-sisters article, but regardless, they did the right thing.

[UPDATE: Adam Blander, Israel Affairs representative of Hillel, sends me a link to a response he signed in The Gazette's letter column ... So yes, Hillel was way more on top of McGill-related letters to the press than The Daily Watch.

— I think it's a good response, although I wouldn't have identified the meaning of the phrase "struggle for freedom" in the original letter the same definitive way the Hillel officers did. The different signatories of the first letter probably had different views of what constitutes authentic "struggle." Some of those views were perhaps more humane than others. ]

Board of The Daily asks students to misread its Constitution, after The Tribune criticized The Daily’s reps for not being forthright

[ UPDATE 5/16/08: After the mini-controversy about this, including Nelles' threat to sue the McGill Tribune, the Daily decided to reform the Constitution to allow for referenda in situations other than fee increases -- but this was after the last issue for 2007-2008. The Daily evidently thought that their argument in the Hyde Park I discuss in this post was not so persuasive. ]

The DPS Board does a Hyde Park in today’s issue, which seems related to The McGill Tribune’s pointing out, while endorsing a YES vote for The Daily’s funding, that the Daily’s Coordinating Editor, Drew Nelles, made incorrect remarks to The Montreal Gazette and The Mirror. Nelles stated wrongly that The McGill Daily — without the University’s 5-year requirement — gives students referenda rights to question The Daily’s funding and anything else.

Nelles has not yet corrected these remarks for McGill students, which he made just before the voting period started. Evidently, he weighed his fear (if not his vanity) against the traditional role of the journalist in a democratic society as someone who is supposed to increase the flow of information (and prevent obscurantism) so people can make the most informed decisions when they go to vote. The Board writes collectively:

Running a referendum campaign takes a lot of time, energy, and money, but it has its perks: students have actually sat down to read through the constitution and bylaws of the Daily Publications Society (DPS) to figure out what is going on. We’ve even received some questions about the possibility of a student-initiated referendum as well as the legality of the referendum currently underway.

This introduction seems like a way for the writer to address The Tribune’s criticisms without directly referring people who haven’t read it already to the Tribune’s critical endorsement. (How many questions about student-initiated referenda did they actually get from non-contributors to The Daily? Did they get any emails about it or just a few remarks from friends that read the Tribune endorsement?) Anyway…

If the writer isn’t assuming people won’t check up when he or she alludes to a section number in The Daily’s Constitution, he/she is confident that most of the students who do look up the section number will acquiesce to any rationalization that the Board attempts. The Board writes:

Who could bring a referendum forward? At present, only members of the DPS Board of Directors can do so directly, but student-initiated referenda with the same consequences as the current one are also made possible in article 16 (4).

In the online version of the Hyde Park, I put a link to the Constitution in the comment space. If we go to Article 16 we can see:

PROCEDURE AND PROCESS FOR QUESTIONS TO BE VOTED ON BY MEMBERS OF THE DPS

16. (1) Voting on questions requiring the decision of the membership of the DPS may be held at an AGM [Annual General Meeting] or SGM [Special General Meeting], except when the question pertains to fees.

This implies that “voting on questions requiring the decision of the DPS” is held at only these two kinds of meetings — in other words, not through a referendum — except when we’re talking about fees (i.e., potential fee increases). Now heading to 16(4) :

(4) Questions Initiated by Members:
(a) No question may be proposed by a DPS member at large directly to the CRO for balloting at a SGM, an AGM, or a referendum.

So the Constitution specifically differentiates these voting meetings from a referendum and is saying No to a question of a potential referendum in this particular line. The Board understands the difference between a “general meeting” and a “referendum” without the Constitution telling them. There are Board members who were in student government. And The Daily has done tons of articles dealing with how a General Assembly is different from a referendum and whether, in various circumstances, a GA or a referendum best represents the principles of direct democracy. Here’s the remaining section of 16(4):

(b) The DPS member is required to have one (1) of the six (6) elected Directors from the Board act on her/his question. The member will submit a written report of his concern to a Director. The Director will ask to have the matter inscribed on an agenda of a duly constituted meeting. Any motion must be moved and seconded and voted on at that meeting [i.e., Board meeting -- DW: Someone calling themselves "Board member" on The Daily website pointed that out to me]. If the question is adopted it will be given to the CRO by the Chairperson.

That’s all of 16(4), and it indicates no referendum right at all. If you open the Constitution as a .pdf file, and search for “referendum” or “referendums” or “referenda,” we see that there is no such right for the student, and referenda are only indicated for questions of fees …

in fact only for questions of fee increases. This referendum process alluded to in 16(4a), with reference to the CRO, is shown to apply to fee increases in 10(1) :

CHIEF RETURNING OFFICER (CRO)

10. (1) The DPS shall have a CRO. He/she shall be chosen by the Board of Directors. The CRO is responsible for overseeing any election or vote at an AGM, and any poll or vote at a SGM. The CRO will also be responsible for running any fee increase referendum.

Did all the Board members get to approve this Hyde Park before one or a few of them wrote it?

This Hyde Park could have easily said something like, “Although students can’t bring referenda to vote yet and there is no provision for them to bring referenda through DPS Board members, they can address problems they have with The Daily by getting the Board to present a question for voting at an Annual General Meeting or Specific General Meeting. They can then attend and vote at that meeting, where they will have the same voting rights as anyone in attendance.”

What a simple thing to say to get across some truth, after the misunderstandings Nelles fostered in his interviews with The Gazette and The Mirror, which The Tribune responsibly noted in their endorsement of the YES vote. Someone(s) on The Board decided that the simple route — Nelles reevaluating his published comments — wasn’t as desirable as a much more complicated route around a problem: retroactively trying to clean up what they saw as a potential mark on the reputation of the Coordinating Editor of the newspaper and the conduct of the YES Committee.

Wanting to absolve Nelles from The Trib’s criticism, they radically misread line 16(4a), which is only a rule that a student can’t try to force a referendum through the head electoral officer. This is an important rule to keep cadres of students from interfering with the Daily, since going to the head electoral officer with your proposed referendum is the only way student-initiated referenda happen at McGill.

____________

And Nelles waxes on, in the belief he’s a victim ….

There wouldn’t have been anything on this count to damage Nelles’ reputation if he had just admitted a mistake to the students before the voting period started. (He could have added, as the Board says today, that the Constitution could be altered at the General Meeting in April.) To err is human; we understand.

If Nelles had acted quickly to clear up misconceptions prompted by his remarks, the students would have seen that The Daily had a Coordinating Editor who subordinated other concerns — including his own pride or the loss of a few votes in the referendum — to the journalistic responsibility to provide students full information for the imminent vote.

Nelles could have simply admitted the mistake, and gone on editing his newspaper, doing his best to be a good journalist. But like he did in this Op-Ed — where he claimed to be victim of bluster who did nothing but follow the advice of a lawyer — our Coordinating Editor is again not accepting responsibility for what he says or does at the paper. Feeling righteous in victimhood was the attitude that produced Nelles’ remarkable quote which I [had once] put at the top of the blog, if you read its context:

Occasionally, during my darkest hours, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing at The Daily. I wonder if we should maybe give this journalistic-objectivity, fair-and-balanced thing a shot. But [the conduct of Gazette reporter Peggy] Curran and The Gaz have eased my worries.

With Nelles and the Board presenting an undivided front that his mistakes were really not mistakes, how are students going to trust Board members to faithfully represent their wishes at one of the DPS meetings they describe in the Hyde Park?

“Bests” before the referendum

Some of these people I’ve complimented before, but here goes …

Best all-around writer: Braden Goyette. A Culture editor next year please.

Best news writer: Lendon Ebbels. Ebbels’ stories had interesting details that got beyond the two-toned story, and opened up every subject, made you want to learn more about it.  But there were a lot of close seconds here. Max Halperin had the tight-as-drum news style down. Jennifer Markowitz wrote well, approaching stories midway between the styles of Ebbels and Halperin.

Best culture writer: Claire Caldwell. Her writing got almost totally outside the jargon bubble and she had the best control of tone … Maybe a few of the other writers if they had racked up more stories would have come close to Caldwell but she was leagues better than the ones who wrote a lot.

Best illustrations: a lot of the stuff in The Daily Art Supplement was good, but truth is I’m only really familiar with Dave Pullmer’s stuff … He was consistently good all year, probably the asset of The Daily that The Tribune could have got into a bidding war over to attract more attention to their paper, if stuff like that happened. (And as I understand it, the stipend for editors at The Daily is MUCH higher than for The Tribune editors who only get $250 per year or semester, I can’t remember which. [UPDATE here.])

Best compendium writer: Duncan Stockwell Links. Although his first piece of the year was really unimpressive, everything afterward went on to show talent. The Beatles revisionism was creative, if it didn’t have much laughs and he started to get outright funny with the “pennies” piece. I’m sorry I didn’t find an opportunity to compliment him between then and now but serious things intervened like the Rachel-Corrie-and-Anne-Frank-are-soul-sisters cover piece, with its related errors.

Best column: I guess it was Floh Herra-Vega’s, which was always well-written and honest … It didn’t try to “spin” anything. Although I can’t recall agreeing with her on what she picked to write about, you never got the sense she was shutting down conversation.

Best html code: that would have to be Peter Hurley, the web editor. But seriously the new website showed major possibilities as soon as it was up, and will probably improve the quality of The Daily for the next 5 years, when they have another referendum.

The Tribune’s endorsement today for The Daily gets it mostly right

Here are the Tribune’s endorsements, and here is the part relating to The Daily (I’ll link to Daily Watch discussion that relates to the points in the Trib piece) :

The Tribune encourages a “Yes” vote concerning the Daily Publication Society referendum. Undoubtedly, securing the continuing fiscal existence of our neighbours downstairs is essential to preserving a diverse campus press, as well as honouring the legacy of the 97-year old paper. That being said, the campaigning by the “Yes Committee” has been marked by half-truths, electioneering and misleading information regarding the publication society’s constitution.

Nobody is explicitly targeting the Daily or le Délit, contrary to what the [YES] committe[e] would have students believe — rather, they simply need a renewed mandate from students in order to sign a new Memorandum of Agreement with the University. Such mandates are routine matters for independent clubs and services. Indeed, even the Daily’s most vehement critics (see dailywatch.blogspot.com) [sic] support the fee renewal.

Out of sportsmanship as much as wanting not to traumatically interrupt our having competing campus media until The Daily can hold an emergency referendum.

Further, the Daily should not be the only major on-campus fee that is not opt-outable. QPIRG, the Midnight Kitchen, CKUT and the Tribune all accept the accountability that comes with accepting student funds. In 2004, when students tried to make the hefty DPS fee optional, the papers fought tooth and nail to avoid such a situation, even taking the question to J-Board and getting the results sealed on a technicality. As of now students cannot opt-out of the Daily’s $5 per semester fee, or even vote to lower the paper’s fee.

Assuming that its editorial policies or the Constitution don’t stay exactly the same — and I don’t believe they’ll stay exactly the same — I don’t think all $10 per year should be opt-outable for each student. The possibility of a total opt-out might put too much pressure on the editorial content.

Coordinating editor Drew Nelles has told both the Montreal Gazette and the Mirror that students can theoretically organize a referendum to address any potential problems with the paper, but this is not actually the case. The Daily’s constitution autocratically states that questions regarding lowering the Daily fee or even make it opt-outable are “inadmissible.”

Nelles needs to at least correct this in Thursday’s issue or in the Daily’s blog before the voting period ends.

Further, the Daily has not been our independent student paper since 1911. Rather, they secured independence from SSMU in 1981. Despite these factual oversights and distortions on

Is The Tribune making the point that The Daily was acting pretty independently for years even though it wasn’t officially separate from the student body? I guess that’s a fair point … but it eventually had to fight SSMU to stay independent, and then in 1986 had to directly fight the students to keep their editors. The Tribune also has editorial autonomy, but how easily could that be taken away?

the part of the Yes committee, a “No” vote would seriously jeopardize the continued existence of the Daily and le Délit and imperil our diverse campus media — a wholly undesirable situation.

Yep.