War with Asians column explained, questioned

Update: The editors of The Campus Press at Colorado University published a story detailing the process behind publishing a column by Max Karson that called for a war on Asians.

Another set of Campus Press editors have a companion piece that explains their disagreement with the decision to publish Karson’s column.

There’s also a petition calling for changes at the paper.

The editors who published the piece wanted more edgy opinions in their paper, but the execution of Karson’s column was obviously a total disaster. Apparently a companion piece to Karson’s by Korean American Felix Im (I believe this is it) weren’t linked to each other on the website. Even if they were, Karson’s column still doesn’t come across as the satire it was meant to be.

As I said before, the editors should have recognized that Karson’s piece was not written well enough to come across as satire and make relevant social commentary about race.

The staff of The Campus Press is going to participate in cultural sensitivity training, which I suppose will help.

Within the journalism industry, there’s been a decades long effort to diversify our ranks and diversify coverage. The Campus Press incident makes it clear how important this is.

This post can also be found on Hyphen magazine’s blog.