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College paper retracts post claiming Rubio mocked the Bible, promises outside investigation

In a small triumph for the willingness of college journalists to hold themselves accountable, The Daily Pennsylvanian has retracted a post featuring its own wrongly captioned video – a mistake that helped get a man fired – and promised an investigation into its error.

Shot and posted over the weekend, the Daily video showed Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio making a brief comment to a staffer for rival Ted Cruz. The audio was difficult to make out, but the Daily captioned it “Good book you got there. Not many answers in it. Especially in that one.”

The “book” turned out to be the Bible, a Cruz staffer later told the Daily – a detail it added to the story, which now claimed the strongly Catholic Rubio was publicly mocking the Bible.

Except he wasn’t – Rubio’s campaign said he told the young man, who was reading Proverbs, “all the answers are in there” – and the Cruz campaign fired its communications director for sharing the wrongly captioned video on social media.

Following criticism, including from The College Fix, the Daily removed the subtitles and left up the raw footage. It posted a timeline of events on its reporting Monday night – though it’s still a little defensive (“We continued to believe we heard an ‘N’ sound,” as in “not”) – and a story early Tuesday about the fallout from the video, and late Tuesday, it took down the post completely.

The president of the Daily, Colin Henderson, wrote a post taking (institutional) responsibility for its botch:

First, before reporting on and publishing the transcript from the encounter, we should have reached out to the parties involved to confirm what was actually said and what book the Cruz staffer was reading once we realized Rubio was referring to the book in the interaction. We failed to do so.

Second, upon learning later in the day that the book in question was the Bible, we should have taken the time to understand how the new information changed the context and weight of the situation and should have reevaluated our reporting accordingly before publishing any updates. Again, we failed to do so.

Just as Rolling Stone enlisted the Columbia Journalism School after its University of Virginia gang-rape story fell apart, the Daily has “reached out to alumni who are professionals in the world of journalism to diagnose where we are at fault and how we can do a better job next time,” Henderson said:

We will continue to discuss the takeaways from this particular incident internally, and we are confident that our evaluations will inform how we can better serve the Penn community moving forward.

The Daily shows how a college paper should operate – transparently with its readers, fessing up to mistakes – rather than administrators taking punitive action against it or students destroying its print run and trying to get it defunded.

Read Henderson’s letter, the Daily fallout story and the timeline of events.

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About the Author
Associate Editor
Greg Piper served as associate editor of The College Fix from 2014 to 2021.