The following is a column from the public editor. If you have questions or concerns regarding the paper’s coverage and standards or would like to see her cover a particular issue, please contact publiceditor[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
The Daily Princetonian used over 50,000 words to detail three weeks of protest action in McCosh courtyard, Cannon Green, and the surrounding areas. Between April 25 and May 17, the ‘Prince’ published 17 pieces with the word “encampment” in the title to describe how students, faculty, and individuals unrelated to the University administered an encampment in an effort to force Princeton to take action with respect to the warfare in Gaza. 10 of these were live update pages, in which writers provided frequent reports on the actions of the protesters while observing the encampment 24 hours a day.
As similar forms of activism proliferated on campuses across the country, other student papers did the same: The Harvard Crimson published live updates of the encampment in Harvard Yard for three days, as did the Yale Daily News, while The Daily Pennsylvanian provided live encampment updates over eight days. At one point, even The New York Times provided a live tracker as police arrested those occupying a Columbia University building. Despite all this coverage, there are many lingering questions about the protests that spread across America’s colleges last spring. What drove students nationwide to risk their hireability, their degrees, and their safety? Why have their efforts to force universities to “divest and disassociate from Israel” largely failed? And to what extent were the protesters’ actions representative of the college student’s political mindset today?
It is the last question which interests me the most because you will not find the answer in the stories that this newspaper publishes. Just from reading the ‘Prince,’ especially last spring, it would seem that the Israel-Hamas war was the foremost issue on college students’ minds. This was far from the case — when the ‘Prince’ polled students on their top concerns prior to the 2024 presidential election, few voters — for Trump or for Harris — identified the war as a priority. Why then, did the ‘Prince’ act as if last spring’s encampment deserved a huge amount of time, resources, and words to cover?
The Gaza Solidarity Encampment was, in some ways, a unique and notable event for the Princeton community. It was the longest sit-in in University history. From the beginning, the protest joined a national movement of anti-Israel advocacy that appeared to be following in the tradition of 1968’s anti-war protests, which were a “revolution” for the nation. Most crucially, PSAFE arrested two graduate students minutes after the encampment began.
Bridget O’Neill ’26, a head News editor at the ‘Prince,’ noted in an interview that these arrests defined the high stakes of the protest.
“The first thing that happens when the encampment starts is [that] there’s the arrest of two students … this hasn't happened during a protest since the 70s,” she said.
For O’Neill, the fact that the University police was arresting — and could continue to arrest — its students demonstrated that the encampment was going to be an unprecedented event for Princetonians and thus deserved unprecedented attention from the student newspaper.
“Being there for those moments was really important to us because they were big moments that we needed to cover, and we were never sure when they were going to happen,” O’Neill said, explaining why the ‘Prince’ kept reporters on site at the protest 24 hours a day for over 10 days, something it had never done before.
The nature of the University’s rules surrounding sit-ins also influenced the decision of ‘Prince’ editors to engage in live coverage. Since the University declared sleeping outside to be a violation of its rules, Annie Rupertus ’25, O’Neill’s co-head News editor, explained that editors deemed overnight observation necessary to ensure that no action was missed by reporters.
“It really felt like there was always a chance that someone could be arrested … I think it would have been a huge mistake if we hadn't been there for those moments,” Rupertus said. “It was important to us to be monitoring everything at all times.”
But for the 10 days that the ‘Prince’ published daily live tracking pages, no such event occurred. The nights were mostly described as “quiet,” and no further arrests of students engaging in the sit-in occurred. Of course, the ‘Prince’ could not have known how the protest would play out: that it would be mostly uninteresting. Yet decisions to cover events can carry sincere consequences: the result of needless reporting is not always boring stories. Overinvolved reporting can, in fact, result in real harm.
By engaging in frenzied coverage, the ‘Prince’ contributed to the construction of a narrative that the fabric of the campus was torn apart by the encampment and helped create an environment in which advocacy for a change of the status quo in Gaza seemed to be the biggest issue on everybody’s minds. But this was not an accurate picture of what students experienced in Spring 2024. One article captured this well: Though protesters called on the Undergraduate Student Government to cancel Lawnparties, Princeton’s spring concert, the event continued to the general delight of students.
It’s one thing to have a reporter on the scene, in case something noteworthy occurs, but it’s another to publish reporting — constantly — when news is not actually occurring. Day seven of the encampment coverage, for example, is mostly a list of times at which student groups released statements in support of the encampment. For any student on campus, this article was probably unnecessary, as we all received each of those statements in our email inboxes. On the other hand, for readers off-campus, portraying each email and film screening as a happening necessitating a live update turned them into things of interest. Tracking each so-called event live — even if that was just the sending of an email — legitimized them as deserving of attention, contributing to the aims of the protests and amplifying its goals rather than reporting on news — when news exists — in an unbiased way.
The perception of the encampment as a momentous occasion was perhaps influenced by the close relationship between members of the ‘Prince’ and members of the encampment. Student journalists consistently struggle with the fact that they are closely intertwined with the communities they cover, and student newspapers can never fully remove themselves from the social life of a college campus and the subsequent relationships that arise. The fact that several editors at the ‘Prince’ engaged in the encampment was beyond the pale for an organization invested in pursuing truth to maintain a healthy community. I believe that the continued membership in the ‘Prince’ of people involved in the encampment inadvertently shaped — and continues to shape — how the paper covers the Israel-Hamas war and University policy related to activism, among other key issues.
Participants were not allowed to report or edit for the ‘Prince’ while encamping. Nevertheless, their involvement has undermined the reputation of the ‘Prince,’ both then and now. Readers, many of whom are students and could identify editors among the protesters, were left confused about the separation between the paper and its reporting subjects — was the ‘Prince’ engaging in neutral coverage or amplifying an issue that was important to many of its members? During the encampment, the focus on maintaining a furious publication pace meant that the identity of protesters was not always made clear, and the paper even published photos of our editors engaging in protest action without identifying them. Today, these editors, clearly uncommitted to pursuing an unbiased narrative of the world, remain on the masthead.
Reporters who conceive of their role as one of an activist represent a rising issue in journalism. Perceiving the world objectively is, for many, no longer a priority. Rather, they aim to further a narrative in which justice and righteousness has been predetermined and report accordingly. Biases can never be eliminated from a newsroom, but allowing those who prioritize struggling for change over impartial reporting significantly worsens the problem. Where it is possible, the ‘Prince’ must seek disciplined staff and editors who are willing to deeply investigate the truth rather than act as if they already know it. Otherwise, an activist perspective towards journalism will become normative at the paper — if it isn’t already.
The ‘Prince’ is not always cognizant of how it presents itself to its readers — something which must be on the forefront of a good paper’s mind. Trust in reportage is not innate, and readers will reevaluate a publication constantly. Commitments to objectivity — and transparency about when it might be significantly compromised — is crucial so that readers can have enough information to accurately judge whether a story is true. Unfortunately, the truth is often obfuscated because journalists fear that the full reality — including moments of error or admittance of uncertainty — will lead to disbelief and lack of trust. Nowhere is the problem of promoting an image of certainty and constant reliability over honesty more clear than in the encampment story that the ‘Prince’ did not cover.
After several students entered Clio Hall to begin an occupation of the building, student journalists were asked to leave by the police and complied. The absence of reporters in Clio Hall is one of the reasons that, to this day, questions persist about what went on within. Those who are interested in the truth have two prevailing narratives on which to rely that directly oppose each other: one from professor Ruha Benjamin, who initially had joined student occupants demanding divestment but exited the building 30 minutes before arrests of students began, and the other from Vice President of Campus Life Rochelle Calhoun, who described the events based on the negative experiences of staff and police. While Benjamin maintains that the protest was peaceful and legitimate, Calhoun painted a different picture, condemning the actions of the protestors as “unacceptable” and “abusive” towards staff.
“I think it’s very unfortunate that the University made that choice to close it off to student journalists,” Rupertus said. She added that the presence of student journalists would have allowed the ‘Prince’ to accurately tell the community what happened inside.
The truth about Clio Hall is known — just not by the public. There is body camera footage from PSAFE officers inside that has yet to be released. The ‘Prince’ could not have acted differently in the moment, as the safety of student reporters must be a priority for a student newspaper. But perhaps this problem of lacking information can be the biggest lesson for ‘Prince.’
Cultivating relationships with those in power and publicizing when they fail to be transparent are some of the most important missions of a newspaper. Yet the absence of the ‘Prince’ inside the most newsworthy event of the encampment was never really reckoned with. There has never been an honest communication to our readers detailing our own lack of knowledge and the limits of our reporting. It is a glaring absence that the ‘Prince’ has never published an article on how exactly, and why, student journalists were barred from Clio or on the so-far-unsuccessful processes of releasing body camera footage to the public.
Instead, the ‘Prince’ made it a priority to explain how Princeton treated other students in its coverage. During my conversation with O’Neill and Rupertus, both emphasized that their interest in covering the encampment was much less about the actual aims of the protesters, but rather in examining the interaction between the University and its students.
“It was really interesting for us to compare how our University was responding compared to other universities and how our students were acting compared to other students, like it’s part of a much bigger conversation,” Rupertus said, adding that Princeton was mostly alone among the nation’s higher education institutions in barring students from sleeping outdoors.
Rupertus and O’Neill agreed that the encampment, along with the administrative and disciplinary processes it spawned, was most important to the Princeton community for its depiction of the relationship between the administration and students.
“Here’s this encampment, it’s this big spectacle, but this is how it directly relates to the functions of the University and how it’s gonna affect you then too, as a student here,” O’Neill said, describing why she felt the reporting was important for all students, whether they were aware of the encampment or not.
I think, however, that few would agree with this characterization of the encampment. Covering events as symbols for what a reporter thinks they represent — not the reality of what they are — is a dangerous game: It disrespects the subjects of reporting and opens the door for speculation and fiction when objectivity and truth are key. It appears impossible to separate the nature of recent activism from what it is advocating for — divestment from and the breakage of ties with the world’s only Jewish state.
The way in which the University handles demands for change from students has become a recent obsession for the ‘Prince.’ But where is the interrogation of how students demand change? In coverage of the encampment, the ‘Prince’ constantly sought to push past the face value of what the administration said, but I’m not sure that this was really attempted with student speech or action. Did the ‘Prince’ sufficiently question the actions, aims, and motivations of protesters? Journalists often use the maxim that they should punch up — and not down — to guide their work, meaning that they should seek to question those in power and hold them accountable for missteps. But sometimes those without obvious power make missteps too, which can significantly hurt people around them. The ‘Prince’ must recommit to seriously inquiring into these dimensions of noteworthy events as well.
Critiquing the past is always a dangerous endeavor, for the teleological perspective is all too easy to follow. But the paper did real harm by stoking the flames of a frenzy that left campus mostly unchanged. Despite my insistence that most students were unbothered by and unconcerned with the encampment, it was certainly a prominent part of my semester: hearing students call for an intifada, watching one raise the flag of a terrorist cell devoted to killing Jews, and seeing friends turn hostile in an attempt to force action I consider unjust scared me and brought me to tears many times. Observing staff and editors of the ‘Prince’ — my coworkers — broadcast political ideologies while only interrogating the mechanism of their dissemination, and not the message, certainly did not help.
Abigail Rabieh is a senior in the history department from Cambridge, Mass. She is the public editor at the ‘Prince’ and writes to address issues of journalistic quality and ethics.