The Yale Daily News is here to inform, record and report. But sometimes, the News makes mistakes.
My name is Dante Motley, and I am the public editor for the News. Public editors are oversight officers who watch over a paper’s journalistic ethics. Much of the implementation of journalistic ethics is an internal process; I am here to ensure transparency for our readers and accountability to our community. Throughout the year, I will write columns and produce multimedia projects displaying our journalistic process, addressing how we have gone, and continue to go, wrong and explaining what steps we will take in an effort to do better.
I am a former managing editor of the News. I understand the daily challenges of running a daily paper and the hundreds of mistakes that can be made and are often avoided in a week. In no way am I here to place personal blame on any participant in the News, past or present. Still, I have seen us fall short. I have felt it. I know where to look. And I am here to look for and to patch up our institutional shortcomings: the declining trust of the student body in us, our continual failure to repair relationships with communities of color and the culture within the News itself that so many of our staffers find problematic and abrasive, to name a few.
Internally, I work with the editor in chief, Anika Arora Seth, on matters of journalistic ethics. Together, we conduct reporter training for any member of the student body who wants to join the News — from first years to post-docs — to ensure that even our newest reporters are equipped with the skills to abide by the high standard we hold for our reporting. When the News faces backlash, I advise on our shortcomings, address them publicly and work with the News on implementing any necessary changes to ensure that when we make a mistake, it won’t happen again.
Last month, Anika and I wrote a column together accompanying the release of a piece by a former News editor detailing the reasons why she left the News. While Anika and I wrote about upcoming changes to election procedures, we did not address the serious racialized component of the piece. These often long-standing, dejecting proclivities within the News — and within journalism at large — are big and intertwined, and it is hard to get to everything at once. So, through a bi-weekly column, I hope to untangle the complex histories, procedures, cultures and mistakes that form a paper’s ethics and its relationship with the public.
As an anthropology major — and as one who is a little annoying about it — I cannot conclude without the inclusion of a bit of ethnographic theory. Anthropologist Mary Douglass proposed in her book “How Institutions Think” that institutions, through a collectivity of thought, do the thinking for us. Still, she emphasizes, we are not devoid of individual responsibility as these institutions live on through our own selves and our own agency.
The News is old. For decades, the only people with bylines pressed on our sheets were white men. And sadly, the spirit of that lives on in our institutions, not just at the News, but at Yale and beyond. Now it stands our responsibility to rebuke institutional thinking, acknowledge where our agency failed us and, most importantly, change.
DANTE MOTLEY is a senior in Grace Hopper College and the News’ current public editor. You can contact him at dante.motley@yale.edu.