The Brown Daily Herald is the student newspaper for Brown University, a hoitiest of the toitiest Ivy League college, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and is the seventh oldest college in the United States. Highly selective, Brown accepts only the best of the best, or president’s daughters, and even they can get kicked out for poor academic performance.

So it was with some amusement that I read this, with a hat tip to my good friend Hube:

Editors’ note: Changing deadnames and pronouns

By 131^th Editorial Board^[1]Editors’ Notes are written by The Herald’s 131st editorial board: Kayla Guo ’22.5, Henry Dawson ’22.5, Li Goldstein ’22, Emilija Sagaityte ’22, Kate Ok ’22, Emily Teng ’22 and Kamran … Continue reading | Monday, May 17, 2021

In order to respect individuals’ current and lived identities, The Herald has adopted a new policy regarding requests from transgender or nonbinary individuals to replace their deadname and/or change their pronouns featured in previously published work on The Herald’s website. Upon receiving such a request, The Herald will make the gender-affirming changes online in a timely manner and without a correction or editor’s note marking the change.

It is normal journalistic procedure to note corrections made to articles, so the Herald is telling readers that it will not abide by what the journalism students are (supposedly) being taught by their professors.^[2]The 131^th Editorial Board members, being in their late teens and early twenties, may never have heard of JournoList, from which I have taken the word ‘journolism.’

This policy is intended to respect transgender and nonbinary individuals. We will not include an editor’s note announcing the gender-affirming change(s) made in response to such a request because we believe such a note would risk outing the individual and causing harm. Because the information included in the article was accurate at the time of publishing, we do not feel this raises questions about transparency or accountability.

What does that even mean? If “the information included in the article was accurate” at the time of publication,^[3]Note that I have corrected their grammar. Journalism students should not have such poor grammar. then it was accurate, and this editorial change is one which makes the article inaccurate. If “the information included in the article was accurate” at the time of publication, then declining to note such is the opposite of “transparency or accountability.” Accountability means taking responsibility for one’s actions; the Editorial Board are deliberately refusing accountability.

How, I have to ask, does changing a story, without issuing a notice of correction, avoid “outing the individual and causing harm”? Clearly, if the person in question identified as one sex at the time the story was written, and another later on, that story has gone deep into the archives. Almost no one would see the old story unless he were searching for it, and a search for Cindy Brown is not going to result in a story about Carl Brown. The Editorial Board are sacrificing journalistic integrity for no reason at all.

We think this policy reflects both our commitment to accuracy and our ethical obligation to minimize harm. We are eager to see how other newsrooms, both our student peers and at professional news organizations, address this and similar questions in the coming months and years.

As we have noted concerning the Lexington Herald-Leader’s and McClatchy’s (apparent) policies in general, withholding information is both a deliberate inaccuracy and can promote actual harm.

Journalists have a self-assumed duty to the truth; what the Editorial Board are doing is to deliberately obscure the truth. If John Smith was publicly identifying as John Smith at the time of the news story, it becomes wholly inaccurate to change his name to Jane Smith just because he has decided that he is a she now. The news story was about the situation at the time, and includes how other people saw and reacted to John Smith, not Jane Smith.

A great truth of which the Editorial Board may be unaware: people react differently to males and females, and this is part of the news.

One would hope that “how other newsrooms, both our student peers and at professional news organizations, address this and similar questions in the coming months and years,” is to address such issues is by doing something really radical, like telling the truth. The Editorial Board of The Brown Daily Herald have apparently decided that telling the truth is far less important than being #woke and trendy.