Today’s print edition of The Harvard Crimson contains an advertisement that was already the topic of conversation even before we read it. Behold:
Uh-oh.
We predict an editorial in tomorrow’s Crimson about this. But a quick Google search for “the crimson bradley smith” will yield an Op-Ed from 1994 where someone already discusses the matter. The writer, Joanna Weiss, details why Smith’s ad was not run back then. Weiss reminds:
The truth is, refusing to run an ad has nothing to do with promoting freedom of expression. A newspaper is not an open forum, like a street corner or an open kiosk. It’s a privately owned organization that sells its space. An advertisement, then, represents a business transaction–not a public statement.
And:
[Bradley Smith] sent out a second ad, this one more limited in subject and more innocuous in tone. It suggested that people rethink the Holocaust, but didn’t refute facts outright. . . And the main reason The Crimson decided against running the ad was the fact that it was hateful. We didn’t want to sell our space to print a hateful message, regardless of its exact wording.
Surely there are disagreements, right?
The decision to review ads often pits a newspaper’s editorial and business sides against each other. Each Holocaust ad would have given the Crimson more than 1,000 much-needed dollars. But the division isn’t always the same, with business aching to run the ad and editorial aching to quash it.
So did business win this time? Or did the advertisement just pass over the heads of enough people who would have otherwise said no? Will tomorrow’s Crimson attempt to explain why it decided to run the ad? Stay tuned.
EDIT: Tomorrow, the Crimson is going to publish a letter addressing the issue. You can find it here.
Tags: Harvard, Holocaust, The Crimson
[...] Crimson’s front page, a departure from the school’s previous stance on Smith. The blog Kitsch/Posh points out that the Crimson’s editorial team in 1994 rejected Smith’s questionable [...]
[...] Crimson’s front page, a departure from the school’s previous stance on Smith. The blog Kitsch/Posh points out that the Crimson’s editorial team in 1994 rejected Smith’s questionable [...]