Response of the News Organization: Ordinarily the News Council’s procedures calls for a complainant to state his or her case and to answer questions from members, then for the news organization to state its side and answer questions from members before the council deliberates upon the issues and votes to uphold or deny the complaint.

In this case, the news organization asked the Chair’s permission to speak first. Executive Editor Tim McGuire began by apologizing to Professor Lass, saying that while the paper stood by the main thrust of its story on the Indian Studies program, it wished it had “exhausted all efforts” to find Lass and interview him. McGuire said that the reporter had tried to find Lass but failed. Told by an employee of the History Department that Lass “won’t be back,” the reporter took that to mean that he was gone for the summer. Lass explained to the Council that the school term had three weeks to run and that he could easily have been reached.

Lass accepted the apology but said he wished that it had been offered six months earlier, when he first complained directly to the paper. He asked McGuire to send it in writing to him, with copies to his academic supervisors. He said the story had damaged his reputation for integrity and that, had the reporter interviewed him, he would have been able to document the fact that the student’s grades had not been changed arbitrarily but were based purely upon objective tests.

McGuire pointed out that the newspaper had, in the absence of comment from Lass, included in the article the contextual information that Lass’s account of the Sioux Uprising had blamed the war on whites. On the second question, McGuire said that, if a reporter cannot reach an important source, the newspaper must “balance its desire to go with a story against the need to corroborate the facts” it has gathered.

Decision of the News Council: Since the newspaper made a pre-emptive apology, the discussion turned on whether the News Council should formally consider the complaint. McGuire said he expected that, given the apology, Lass and the Council would drop the complaint. Lass left it to the Council.

Public member Ron Graham moved that the Council uphold the complaint, saying that it was the business of the Council to hear it and to issue a determination. The newspaper based its apology upon an admission that it had fallen short of its own standard, he said, and upholding the complaint clearly acknowledges that admission for the record. The motion carried. The Council majority also commended the Star Tribune for its forthright apology.

When McGuire said that he had hoped the apology would erase the complaint, media member Ron Handberg said that it was the News Council’s very process that produced the apology, which could have been issued at any time before the hearing but was not. The minority in the 5-3 vote (two members abstained) did not endorse the newspaper’s conduct in the reporting and publication of the story; rather, they felt that the apology should have earned the paper relief from the formal complaint.

Concurring: Graham, Handberg, Orwoll, Peterson, Smith

Dissenting: Dornfeld, Parker, Swain

Abstaining: Florence, Simonett