The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s oldest student run news publication is beloved by all students across Penn’s campus. Its influence is unprecedented by any other student club on campus; finding someone who hasn’t been shamed into taking an issue on Locust Walk at some point in time is like finding a “regular reader” of the Daily Pennsylvanian who doesn’t just do the crossword and Sudoku in the back. Students affectionately refer to the publication as “the DP”, a reference to how the publication is simultaneously fucked by both fact checking and grammatical/syntactical scrutiny.
Considering its importance to Penn students, it’s hard not to be shocked by the recent announcement by DP senior editor Jessica Putz.
“We’ve decided to remove all semblance of opinions from our Op-Ed section effective immediately,” writes Putz in today’s front-page article. She later explains, “the envelope really doesn’t have to pushed any further”.
Putz is, of course, referring to the publication’s strange string of bizarrely offensive op-eds over the past few months. While the quality of most of the op-eds normally range from mediocre to better than an average DP op-ed, every month or so some columnist really comes out of left field.
“I think the breaking point was ‘In Defense of ISIS: Why America’s New Enemies Aren’t All That Bad’ by freshman Mark Fresno,” Putz explained in her editorial on the 34th Street website. “We initially thought it wouldn’t get worse than ‘How Eugenics Was One of the Best Ideas in the Past Century” by sophomore Pauline Bailey. Unfortunately, we were incredibly wrong. His traffic numbers destroyed the numbers on the op-ed we made all of our staff members fix by a mile”.
Putz reports, however, that the op-eds will retain the signature DP quality even without the integral presence of opinion within it. “I’ve already got three op-ed drafts sitting on my desk that look great. Their titles alone are just screaming ‘I recently looked a couple facts on about.com but my opinion on this subject is self-contradictory’”.