Last Tuesday, the Ampersand printed a feature that mentioned, and essentially made light of, Tom Cornish and his recent battle with meningitis. It was a mistake, and an abuse of our power. We didn’t ask Tom, or anyone close to Tom, for permission to print a joke about an experience that almost killed him and terrified everyone who knows him.
To say that we regret printing the joke is an understatement and something of a cop-out, even though we do. The fact that a joke about Tom was printed in the Ampersand constitutes more than a bad editorial decision; it shows that we, the staff of the Ampersand, fundamentally misunderstood and abused the privilege of having a forum in which we can basically write whatever we want once a week.
Wesleyan sometimes seems like a bigger place than it is, but it’s not. If you don’t know Tom Cornish personally, you know someone who does. In the real world, an appearance on TV or in a newspaper, voluntarily or not, constitutes an entrance into the public sphere and is thus grounds for lampooning. It’s nice to harbor the fantasy that things work the same way on a smaller scale at Wesleyan, but they don’t.
We want to apologize to Tom. We want to apologize to everyone close to Tom. We don’t think this absolves us, but we intentionally didn’t try to apologize on our own page, because we’re serious, and we’re sorry, and we know the Ampersand lost a lot of credibility last Tuesday. Here it is: we went too far. We printed something cruel. We’ll try to earn your respect back.
-Katie, Nat, Naomi, Steve, Alex and Adam
Leave a Reply