Western Oregon Journal

Issue date: 10/26/07 Section: Post

Dr. Bergeron enjoying his saxaphone. [Click to enlarge]

I admit, I was wrong. I saw only one issue at stake in your front-page display in issue 8.3. I now see two issues, one being a rather technical legal issue, and the other more broad.

The first issue -- the one to which I referred in my initial letter to Gerry Blakney -- is the one of ownership. Let's look at that one first. Is WOJ, as you assert in your masthead, "student-owned"? In your story this week, you explicitly stipulate (in the legal sense of the term) the property claims delineated in Gary Dukes' email. You do point out that operating funds come from the IFC and advertisement revenue, but taken together those two sets of claims would seem to imply only partial student "ownership."

Rather than explore the question of what might be a legal definition of ownership in a case such as this, you seek to divert our attention to the question of whether or not WOJ is student-operated -- a question that was never at stake in the first place. Although you do make an attempt to link the two issues by quoting Curt Yehnert on the semantics of the word "own," this hardly constitutes a strong argument in your favor.

For example, one might infer from his comments that he believes your outrage to have been misplaced -- that you had mistaken a dispute over ownership for a dispute over control. In the end, then, your article in issue 8.4 does nothing to bolster your claim that WOJ is student-owned, and in fact tends to support the view that it's not. The one legal expert whose opinion you invoke tries to obfuscate the issue, but gives himself away with statements like "[The university] (sic) owns it" and "inaccuracy is not a reason for censorship." (N. B.: Check your Chicago manual for rules governing capitalization in cases like this.)

So on to the second issue at stake here -- the one of your right to print the assertion in question. It had not occurred me at first that you might be concerned with this issue, since I made what I now know to have been the specious assumption that you believed your assertion of ownership to be defensible. Under that assumption, I would expect a resolution of the statement's veracity to render any question of censorship moot, since, in either case, the dispute would dissolve: Should your assertion prove to be legally valid, I would expect Dukes to withdraw any claim to the contrary; and conversely, if you understood your assertion to be invalid, I would expect you to voluntarily remove it from the masthead -- to do otherwise would represent your knowingly publishing false information.

Continued...

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