Skip to main content

On DSU the News Journal inverts chronology to give itself a pat on the back

My guess is that yesterday's refusal by DSU senior official to give the News Journal comments on its story about felon-dean Freddy Asinor rankled the reporters quite a bit.

But you really have to love the slick inversion of chronology that takes place in today's story.



In the first two paragraphs, the WNJ says

Delaware State University will review how it conducts background checks on job applicants and audit financial records of a former dean who has embezzlement and forgery convictions, officials announced Thursday. 
The university’s disclosure came hours after the The News Journal reported that some state lawmakers and university trustees urged a change in procedures and an audit.
This, of course, implies a cause and effect relationship to events:  we did the story and then we printed the outcry of legislators, and DSU administration (hitherto having failed to respond to the issue) caved to all the pressure.

Nice narrative.

The only problem is the paragraph in the story that is printed "below the fold":
Williams’ statement said that prior to hiring Asinor’s interim replacement this week, the school began a review of its background check process and an audit, the results of which will be shared with the board of trustees. 
In other words:  last week DSU had already begun the changes that the WNJ and opportunist politicians Patti Blevins and Greg Lavelle chided them for yesterday.

So the idea that the WNJ story prompted any of this action is just so much self-serving pap.

It is legitimate to ask why the DSU administration refused to comment to the WNJ yesterday, if such changes were already under way.

The answer is pretty simple:  in a meeting with DSU faculty and staff of the affected college yesterday, Provost and Academic Vice President Alton Thompson noted first, "The News Journal does not administer this institution."  OK, write that one off to irritability.

But Thompson also said that because the audit would be wide-ranging it was important to get all of the mechanisms into place before making a public announcement.

If you look back at the sordid affair of Freddy Asinor at Clemson it is fairly obvious that what he did there would have involved the tacit if not active participation of others.  If that happened at DSU it would be important to set up the mechanisms to find any potential collaborators or just those who should have known and should have caught any discrepancies before announcing the audit.

This is common sense.  The fact that DSU's announcement missed the WNJ press deadline yesterday in the interests of what Provost Thompson called "getting it right" is material only to the egos of some local politicians--neither of whom has actually ever done a single damn thing to support the university in the first place.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

A reply to Salon's R. J. Eskrow, and his 11 stupid questions about Libertarians

Posts here have been in short supply as I have been living life and trying to get a campaign off the ground. But "11 questions to see if Libertarians are hypocrites" by R. J. Eskrow, picked up at Salon , was just so freaking lame that I spent half an hour answering them. In the end (but I'll leave it to your judgment), it is not that Libertarians or Libertarian theory looks hypocritical, but that the best that can be said for Mr. Eskrow is that he doesn't have the faintest clue what he's talking about. That's ok, because even ill-informed attacks by people like this make an important point:  Libertarian ideas (as opposed to Conservative ideas, which are completely different) are making a comeback as the dynamic counterpoint to "politics as usual," and so every hack you can imagine must be dragged out to refute them. Ergo:  Mr. Eskrow's 11 questions, with answers: 1.       Are unions, political parties, elections, and ...