Issue date: 2/11/08 Section: Forum

Nearly every guide to journalism ethics says anonymous quotes should be avoided. So when I saw Medill Dean John Lavine had used three of them in two columns for Medill magazine, I was surprised.

One quote, in last spring's issue, is attributed to a Medill junior in last winter's "Advertising: Building Brand Image" class, which designed a marketing campaign to discourage drunk driving among teenagers.

The quote reads: "I came to Medill because I want to inform people and make things better. Journalism is the best way for me to do that, but I sure felt good about this class. It is one of the best I've taken, and I learned many things in it that apply as much to truth-telling in journalism as to this campaign to save teenage drivers."

I see no reason for the quote to be anonymous. Many newspapers print their rationale for granting anonymity, but there was no such explanation here.

The phrasing also struck me as odd, and an instructor at Medill, who insisted upon remaining anonymous for fear of retaliation, told me that Lavine often uses the phrase "sure felt good" colloquially. I searched my e-mail and found one message the dean sent to Medill students, dated Oct. 23, 2007, that contained the phrase "we sure want you to know."

Still, these suspicions hardly amount to evidence of the quote's inauthenticity. So I contacted all 29 students in the class, reading the quote and asking whether they said it. (Only five were Medill juniors.)

All the students denied saying the quote, even when I promised not to print their names.

I sat down with the dean and asked for his explanation. In a tape-recorded interview, he told me the quote had come from an e-mail, but when I gave him the class list he could not identify who sent it. "Whether they remember it or not, or told you or not, I see so many of these (e-mails) that I often don't remember," Lavine said. "I wouldn't have quoted it if I didn't have it."

He said he could not find the student to ask permission to print his or her name. (The dean did not indicate the student's gender.) He also said he would not have asked if he could, because attributing quotes in this context would be less necessary than in more traditional forms of journalism.

"The point was not in this instance that you said it, or she said it, or someone else said it," he said. "The point was, this is an opinion, these are feedback I got."

In his columns, the dean has used two other anonymous quotes - attributed to "one student" and "one sophomore," with no further details given - but none in which he named the student or explained why the quote was anonymous.

We cannot be certain these quotes were fabricated. But at the very least, I find reason to be suspicious.

Medill senior David Spett can be reached at
d-spett@northwestern.edu.

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