Update: The Cook County State’s Attorney’s office announced Wednesday afternoon that it had dropped charges against the two Northwestern students accused of distributing parody front pages of the campus newspaper.
Following pushback from staff and alumni, the publisher of Northwestern’s student newspaper will attempt to intervene in the case of two students who were charged after distributing parody front pages.
Those fake front pages, some which were wrapped around real copies of The Daily Northwestern, appeared on campus in October and took aim at the university’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war. “Northwestern complicit in genocide of Palestinians,” read one headline.
Immediately following the incident, the Daily’s parent company, the Students Publishing Company, went to university police and put out a statement that condemned the act as “vandalism.” Police later issued citations to two students for theft of advertising services, a Class A misdemeanor that carries with it a maximum sentence of a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. The law under which the students — both of whom are Black — were charged was originally passed to stop the Ku Klux Klan from inserting unauthorized “hate literature” into newspapers, the Intercept reported.
Outrage over the criminal charges spread on campus in January. More than 6,000 people signed a petition criticizing the publisher for going to the police, and 70 campus groups pledged to boycott the paper until the charges are dropped. The charges were emblematic of larger issues involving the over-policing of Black people, especially those who “engage in critical discourse and advocacy,” according to signatories to the boycott pledge.
Staff at the Daily weren’t happy either. They were not involved with reporting the incident to police (Students Publishing Company acts separately from the paper’s editorial operations), and on Monday, the Daily’s editorial board published an editorial objecting to “the prosecution of our peers.” Privately, more than 40 of the paper’s roughly 60 editors and associate editors also sent Students Publishing Company a letter urging the group to tell the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office to drop the charges.
Top editors, including the paper’s editor-in-chief and several managing editors, signed the letter. They wrote that the boycott had damaged sourcing relationships and forced the paper to withdraw from moderating the student government presidential debate — one of the paper’s most successful events.
“We acknowledge that the students’ alleged actions violated Illinois law and posed potential obstacles to SPC’s financial responsibilities. The false front pages also posed significant personal and professional challenges for The Daily’s staffers, and we recognize that members of our newsroom community found their content objectionable,” the staff wrote. “That being said, we also recognize that involving the police and the legal system endangered the safety of our peers …
“Our newspaper has always prided itself on its commitment to informing and supporting students, and we believe our publisher should play no part in perpetuating harm against the communities that we aim to serve.”
The Daily is editorially independent from the university, and students run the paper’s day-to-day operations. The Students Publishing Company, a nonprofit, handles the paper’s financial operations and selects the editor-in-chief. It is governed by a board of 13 Northwestern faculty, staff, alumni and students.
A group of 81 recent Daily alumni, including five former editors-in-chief and more than 30 former managing editors, also sent Students Publishing Company a letter echoing the staff’s demand. More than 70% of the signatories pledged to stop donating to the Daily and engaging with its content if the board did not ask for the charges to be dropped.
In their letter, the Daily staffers threatened a walkout if the Students Publishing Company did not try to de-escalate the situation in a timely manner. They gave the publisher an end of day Tuesday deadline for a response. Half an hour before midnight, the Students Publishing Company announced they had hired legal counsel to work with the State’s Attorney’s office to “pursue a resolution to this matter that results in nothing punitive or permanent.”
“We have been listening to our fellow community members, and they have been heard. We understand and recognize why we need to take action,” Students Publishing Company board chair John Byrne wrote in the statement published in the Daily. “We hope to heal the hurt and repair the relationships that have been damaged and frayed by our unintentional foray into the criminal justice system.”
Byrne explained that the company notified police of the parody newspapers in an attempt to protect the Daily’s journalists and its reputation.
“It was the use of The Daily as a vehicle to distribute the fake front page that upset us. This co-opting of the work of our student journalists and the potential damage to the reputation of the paper built upon more than a century of hard work was the problem,” Byrne wrote. “To us, it seemed no different from someone hacking into our website to post their own content and replace ours.”
The Students Publishing Company did not understand the implications of signing “complaints” against the individuals involved with distributing the parody pages, Byrne wrote. It set off a process that the board had “never intended.” He added that the state’s attorney office did not ask the company whether it wanted the suspects charged and that the board did not know the suspects were Black Northwestern students until recently.
“It’s only been in the last four days that we learned more information about the people charged: that they are students; that they are Black. Some may disagree, but these facts matter to us.”
It was a sharp turn from a statement the board issued Monday, which called tampering with the distribution of a student newspaper “impermissible conduct.”
Neither Byrne nor the Cook County State’s Attorney Office responded to a request for comment.
Editor-in-chief Avani Kalra declined to comment on the publisher’s statement and instead pointed to the paper’s Monday editorial.
