I risked a great deal when I joined the Facebook group “Say No to Misogyny in the DU Clarion.”
As a former writer and editor, I still have friends on the staff, many of whom would be hurt if the group’s aims were met. Some of them have already expressed their disappointment with my choice to side against them, and that has been painful.
I joined it though, because publishing pieces like “Seven women you’ll meet at DU” will ultimately do more harm to the Clarion than any amount of attention from firebrand activists. It wasn’t the alleged misogyny that bothered me.
Rather, it was the author’s firmly held belief that regurgitating long held gender stereotypes as though he actually believed them qualified as satire.
Mr. Cobb is not a terrible writer. His spelling and grammar are usually respectable, and he clearly owns a thesaurus or knows someone with a large vocabulary that is willing to teach him big words he can use. His failure is in his expression.
Rather than mocking gender stereotypes, he simply wrote them down and hoped that as reasonable people, his readers would assume he didn’t actually believe them and find it funny that he would pretend he did. Clearly, it didn’t work.
I don’t believe Mr. Cobb is a misogynist. I do believe that’s he’s a bad satirist, and if he’s going to continue to write for the Clarion he should learn to differentiate between being funny and being offensive. If they were one and the same, Carlos Mencia would still have a show on Comedy Central.
If Mr. Cobb is reading this, I would advise him to write with the intent of becoming a better writer, not just for the sake of his ego.
As for the editors, I think calling for their resignation is a gross overreaction. They are students, just as you and I are, and the Clarion is as much a learning experience as any class at the University of Denver.
This isn’t their first mistake and it won’t be their last, but I think it would be best if we allowed them to learn from it and improve the Clarion rather than calling for their heads on a platter.
That said, I would address the editors directly: you CANNOT continue to print garbage just to fill space on a page. If you assign someone a humor column, it’s your responsibility to make sure it’s humorous and not patently offensive.
When you publish something, even when you print it in the Op-Ed section, you are endorsing that it is worthy of publishing in the Clarion.
Publishing bad articles makes the Clarion a bad newspaper. Raise your standards a little.
