By Joshua Chang
One of the most essential skills a young journalist must practice is how to take accountability. Whether this means issuing a factual correction or recognizing one’s personal bias, the path to credible and effective journalism is laid in knowing where you’ve fallen short.
The Eyeopener’s standards are no different.
On Jan. 21, The Eye published a story titled, “Student groups respond to Middle East ceasefire deal.” The article described the public statement from Qatar and Hamas officials that confirmed a ceasefire in Gaza. Shortly after its publication, the article raised concerns and criticisms from our readership and community surrounding the language used in the story and a lack of important context.
An error that has since been changed in the online version of this article is the use of the word ‘conflict.’ The Eye acknowledges that the war in Gaza extends far beyond a conflict and is rooted in ongoing oppression lasting decades. In March of 2024, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese published a report concluding that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the conditions in Gaza meet the threshold for genocide.
We acknowledge that important context is missing in the story surrounding Palestine and the genocide of Palestinian people. An article published on Jan. 15 by Al Jazeera reported that 46,707 people in Gaza have been killed by Israel since Oct. 7, 2023—including about 18,000 children. Close to 1.9 million are internally displaced. The live death toll tracker from Al Jazeera brings this number of deaths to 48,237 Palestinians as of Jan. 30.
In October 2024, The Eye masthead sat down to revisit, review and discuss our writing and reporting standards surrounding genocide, language involving Israel and Palestine, permissible descriptions of war and more. A portion of this discussion considered how to refer to the war in our writing. During the article’s reporting process, The Eye decided to refer to the parties involved in the ceasefire by their institutional names—the State of Israel and Hamas. Other platforms such as Al Jazeera have used similar language.
Regardless of terminology used by other institutions, The Eye regrets the lack of context regarding Palestine in the article. We fell short in representing the violence exacted upon Palestinian civilians under the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza in our reporting on the ceasefire. This was a mistake that further contributed to the erasure of Palestinian voices, as well as the erasure of the intense grief reverberating through the Palestinian community for family members, friends and loved ones killed in the war. Though we did not publish any standalone factual errors, there was key context and information missing in the story that made a harmful impact.
The Eye’s standards seek to utilize the best and most accurate methods of delivering news and we will continue to have productive conversations in order to achieve this.
On Jan. 24, more concerns arrived in our Instagram comments. While many comments called for change and voiced genuine concerns, some were harmful claims directed toward our student editors.
The Eye does not platform such comments. As an institution of students, there is no productivity in permitting an online platform to breed demeaning speech.
While constructive feedback should always be welcomed in any content we publish, the same cannot be said about words that make our masthead or community members feel unsafe. In order to do our community’s stories justice, we must be firm and steadfast in our operations.
Nevertheless, criticism is valuable and we must take accountability for where we fall short.
Following the publication of these comments, I made the executive decision to temporarily shut off the comments section on the one post including these accusations until official statements could be made on behalf of the paper and have since reactivated them.
Regardless of intent, The Eye acknowledges that with this act came six days of censorship. For a publication that stands for transparency and honesty, censorship is the absolute last mistake we want to make. We recognize this appears as a contradiction and wish to clarify that these actions were in response to protect our editors from potential harm and threats rather than an attempt at silencing concerned readers. Yet in hindsight, I as editor-in-chief agree this action was dismissive and regret my own lapse in judgement.
As we move forward, we ask that our readers continue to share their critiques. We thank those of you who were not afraid to make your voices heard and called us out as a publication. Publications with any degree of power deserve to be held accountable, and while we don’t exist to please or to adhere to anyone’s particular beliefs, we value being told when we make mistakes.
You may have seen (or written) some of your own critiques on the very papers that held the ceasefire article. The Eye read them—a few of them said, “Do better.” And we intend to.
At the end of the day, our primary objective as a publication is to tell true stories in full—a standard we fell far from in this story. We will continue to learn and grow from these experiences and work to better ourselves, through telling stories that matter, telling them properly and telling them as one.
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