JOHNSON: Editorial was a mistake, but it's a chance to teach

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published September 28, 2007 at midnight

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Ease up on the kid, already. He is, after all, just a kid - certainly by the standards of this business.

J. David McSwane committed a rookie mistake - a really big one - by putting in print and in nasty bold letters an epithet that the polls tell us the majority of Americans may use on a regular basis, when the topic is the president of the United States.

So of course the inevitable, the quite predictable, is playing out. Hands have been wrung dry; administrators at Colorado State University, where McSwane is editor of the school paper, are apologizing profusely.

On his radio program the other day, Rush Limbaugh went into a veritable tizzy over David McSwane's four-word editorial. Think he would have reacted similarly had the target been either of the Clintons?

The same goes for the Campus Republicans at CSU, whether they would have in that case bothered to pick up a pen, much less set about gathering some 300 signatures on a protest petition they presented at a Board of Student Communications hearing held Wednesday to determine the young editor's fate.

I wouldn't bet a nickel on the kid's survival chances. And this has nothing to do with that bad four-letter word he used.

From the fuss and stir he caused, you would have thought he'd cursed Jesus, another word often used when the president's name comes up, but not in the way a lot of his supporters like to think. But it is what will sink McSwane from the editor's chair.

Petitions, the university's apologies, national headlines - all embarrassing stuff, and the easiest thing to do in such times is act tough. The board that oversees the Rocky Mountain Collegian decided Thursday to give him a formal disciplinary hearing next week, after which, I suspect they'll can him, while crowing about standards, decency and what have you.

The last thing they will do, my guess is, is seize what my old man used to call a "teaching moment." It is the term I would use if I had five seconds with David McSwane, who has now lawyered up and gone silent.

Can't use that word. That would be my opening, four-word statement to him, which I've learned after 31 years in this business.

I tried using the unusable back in college days when we actually had an eagle-eyed faculty adviser, whose office was just off the main newsroom. I spent a lot of time in Joanne Carlson's office.

I was a senior and about to get out when her replacement one day fired the entire top editing staff. OK, we had run a bit amok the previous summer trimester. The last straw, we later learned after a hearing much like Wednesday's, was not the use of a four-letter word, but an illustration we planned that showed a silhouetted figure smoking what clearly was marijuana. It was a Christian university, and we were gone.

Today, that fuss and stir seems so foolish. Yet we were just as vilified as David McSwane, the rail similarly greased for our ride out of town.

The difference at Colorado State is that every single bit of editorial decision was seized by McSwane, with no one to say I understand your frustration, but that particular word is a journalistic third rail. The university got what it deserves, considering no one in authority apparently bothered to check the page before it was printed.

In the bar over drinks, kid, I would tell him, shout the four words to your heart's content. Join the crowd. The newspaper is an entirely different thing.

More than anything, it would be a shame to dump this kid. He has some talent.

How many high school kids have the imagination to shut down the entire military recruitment system by posing as a stoned-out dropout desiring to join the U.S. Army? David McSwane even got a recruiter to accompany him to a head shop to buy a kit that masks marijuana use.

By editing a college newspaper as a junior, the kid clearly has ambition, too. He just needs someone to teach him the use of some words conveys only heat and no understanding.

"The CSU Republicans and others have asked me to resign," David McSwane wrote in a statement this week. "I will not resign."

This is a good move, kid.

It is not because what you wrote was the correct thing to do, but because you will never succeed in this business by immediately running and hiding when the partisan loudmouths and other knuckleheads arrive seeking your scalp for dropping the curtain and saying in public what many others are saying in private.

But there are just better ways to do it.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

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