Responding To The Wall Street Journal

The accusation — put forth by Friday's Wall Street Journal editorial page — that The Daily Princetonian bowed to outside pressure in refusing to run a column by Professor Robert George on the day of President Clinton's visit to the University is false. And The Wall Street Journal's decision to make such a charge without first finding out the entire story was alarmingly irresponsible.

"In advance of Bill Clinton's visit to Princeton University yesterday," the Journal wrote on Friday, "the campus newspaper agreed to publish an opinion piece by jurisprudence professor Robert P. George that was critical of the president. When conference planners learned of the agreement, they prevailed upon the editors of the Daily Princetonian not to publish his piece on the day of the visit. We are pleased to print it here."

We imagine that most readers of Friday's Wall Street Journal believed what they read. The Journal is, after all, one of the most widely respected newspapers in the world. Yet the episode is little more than an example of the ability of irresponsible journalists to pass off a one-sided version of events as objective analysis. For three days, we have been unable to correct the Journal's half-truths in print, leaving readers throughout America with no choice but to believe the implications of the Journal's charges. Today, we are taking the first step toward replacing those misperceptions with the truth.

A column by George had been slated to run opposite a column from Professor Sean Wilentz in last Thursday's edition of The Daily Princetonian. The articles were meant to coincide with President Clinton's visit to campus that same day. Wilentz was to write a column about Clinton's place among progressive presidents, while George was to write a piece that would be critical of Clinton.

However, upon learning that he would be writing opposite George — as opposed to writing a stand-alone essay — Wilentz said he would withdraw his column. We were naturally disappointed that Wilentz did not want to participate in the point-counterpoint that we were attempting to arrange. With Wilentz trying to dictate the terms of how his column would be presented — and facing the prospect of having only one article to run in what we had hoped would be a carefully balanced debate — the editorial board made what we felt was the best decision: We refused to run either column.

It clearly would have been our preference to have run both the column by Wilentz and the column by George. But without both — and without enough time to solicit a replacement for Wilentz's column — we felt the best choice was to refuse to publish either column alone.

Friday's Wall Street Journal stated only that we had declined to run George's column. It neglected to mention the other half of the story — that we refused to publish Wilentz's column as well. We are distrubed that Wall Street Journal editors did not contact us, and that they chose to portray our actions as the selective censorship of conservative views, rather than explaining them for what they were.

We would never allow a controversial article to run in The Daily Princetonian that did not confirm a story from all sources involved, and we are surprised that The Wall Street Journal does not adhere to the same basic standards of reporting that we have learned during our admittedly short careers as journalists.

Some have suggested that George's column should have run next to the piece that we eventually did publish on Thursday's editorial page — a column by graduate student Jason Brownlee suggesting that Clinton be named the next president of Princeton. But this assertion ignores the nature of the academic debate we were attempting to arrange. While Brownlee is complimentary of Clinton in his column, his speculative prose would not have served as an effective counterweight to George's piece on the legacy of the Clinton administration. Though it was well-written, Brownlee's submission discussed an altogether different issue. Additionally, it would have been inappropriate to pit a graduate student against a world-renowned professor in what we had hoped would be a carefully balanced scholarly debate.

We are disappointed that Wilentz withdrew his column when he was told that it would be run in a point-counterpoint format. We are pleased that George found another outlet for his column, but are disappointed that he believes he had a right to have the piece appear in our newspaper notwithstanding the collapse of the point-counterpoint. Most of all, we regret that our readers never had the opportunity to see two of the University's top professors weigh in on a fascinating and contentious issue.

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But we reserve our strongest words of condemnation for those editors at The Wall Street Journal whose fragmented version of this story has misled millions of readers across the nation for the past three days.

No one — liberal or conservative — will be permitted to bully the editorial staff of The Daily Princetonian into making decisions. And whether that bullying comes from a professor or a world-famous editorial page, we will not allow it to compromise the independence and integrity of our newspaper.