It happened

Unbelievable. Carrie Wood finally resigned. I heard it from someone at the interest meeting for the radio station XTSR and I broke my boycott of the paper by picking up a copy of the Towerlight.

I guess it's my turn to say "what goes around comes around", but I won't. When I heard the news, I was shocked, a little happy, saddened, and empathetic. I read the Towerlight statement and Wood's final statement straight through quickly as I made my way to find dinner at Newell Dining Hall. I thought it would never happen, but it did. And the best part is, the reason for her resigning has nothing to do with me.

She quit because she allowed a sex columnist to get published there every week. She could have let some other columnist take the spot, such as the "Your a Idiot" column or someone else's column that didn't provide any graphic information. The anonymously written blog/column "The Bed Post", according to the campus paper statement, was addressing a "sensitive topic" and contained sexual details. Because of that, the University President Robert Caret sent Wood an email last Wednesday and Wood responded in the worst way.

She described in her statement that she acted in complete panic. "I responded out of feelings of fear and of being threatened," she wrote. "In my response, passages were worded in such a way that made it look as if I was throwing my staff under the bus and pushing the responsibility for the column on them."

The paper said it was possibly a mistake, publishing the sex column, but this has been going on for almost a month. The editor and staff could have looked at Lux's work intensively and thought about it. They could have realized that it would be unethical and bad taste to publish her columns.

Then again, this somewhat does have to do with First Amendment rights. In my Media Law class, I learned that there have been lawsuits between high school papers and the school's administrators. Supreme Court ruled that public school administrators can tell what the papers can and cannot publish. But not college papers; college papers are protected by the Constitution.

Still, pornography is still a major issue; it was distasteful to publish that at this time. Someone should have thought of that.

It was a wise decision for her to leave her position and write a statement explaining the situation. If I was in her shoes, I would have panicked, too; I would have had another anxiety attack. But I wouldn't place blame on other staff members. When it comes to publishing explicit content, it's usually the editor's fault as well as the production's fault. The editor should have realized that it was wrong to publish it and she wouldn't have been in danger.

Thank God it wasn't because of me. I'm happy just for that. I don't want to be the reason for her leaving the position. I would have felt that everyone at the paper hates me because I would have done it and I'd suddenly become the enemy. I don't want to be the enemy.

The sadness that I feel is because I still can't work there at the paper since I'm still on University probation. That, and I feel that my writing dream is now slowly dying of cancer. It's not because of Carrie Wood, it's because of me as a person.

I get too emotional when I get rejected or someone yells at me. I always have a fear of it and I end up losing control when that happens. However, I am constantly reminded with the fact that reporters and writers get rejected and yelled at all the time. Some readers don't like particular articles that they sometimes go up to the writers and scream at them about it.

Because I can't take those responses very well; maybe I shouldn't be a writer at all. Then again, I'd have to see what the psychiatrist says and how I'll react to medication. Still, I feel like I should never write for that newspaper ever again. Besides, some of the articles and opinion pieces are wrong or they just disappoint me.