By Anne Baker
The latest issue of the Times New Roman (TNR) was scheduled to hit campus in early December. Instead, nearly the entire run of the student-led humor magazine has been gathering dust on the fourth floor of the Curry Student Center.
Despite racking up a $3,000 price tag on 4,500 copies of the publication, which is funded through the activities fee, students hoping to catch a glimpse on their returns may have to sift through a few recycling bins.
That’s because copies of the magazines were pulled from campus by TNR staff within hours after they were delivered.
Although TNR staff moved quickly, it wasn’t enough to stop Dave Moberg, editor in chief of The Northeastern Patriot, from tracking down his own copy.
The strange part, Moberg said, was that he found it among a large stack of copies, underneath a note that read: “Do not distribute. We will get in trouble.”
Publication rights Yesterday, several TNR editors said in interviews with The News that they became anxious about the content of the December issue following a conversation with their advisor, Sandra Miller, who works in Student Affairs.
Three articles that ran in the magazine, TNR said, risked being considered obscene, including a piece that associated The Patriot with recent homosexual scandals in the Republican party and an open letter to Northeastern President Joseph Aoun that referred to him as “a douchebag.”
“Every publication has the right not to publish something that they feel might not have been done in … the way that they wanted it to be published,” said Miller, who also serves in an advisory capacity with The News. “They talked to me about the issue and they had second thoughts.” Sean O’Reilly, a middler communication studies major who served as TNR president in December, took responsibility yesterday for holding back the edition.
“We reviewed the issue with the staff, and we felt there were a couple of things that did not fit our style, so we decided to reprint the issue,” he said. Moberg said he has a different theory of what happened.
“I really do think this was a case of TNR feeling pressured,” he said. “Maybe not explicitly pressured, but certainly they were worried about their own skin after printing the issue, and that’s why they pulled it.”
As he began reporting the story for The Patriot, the campus conservative news source, Moberg said he faced criticism from O’Reilly and Miller, as well as Stephen Asay, chairman of the university’s Media Board, which reviews and approves budget allocations.
Moberg said O’Reilly and Miller contended the pullback to be a non-story, while Asay, he said, “Asked me in a very heartfelt manner not to print it.
“He was very unexcited that we were going to print something like that because he didn’t want the administration to start cracking down on Media Board, because certain groups within Media B oard were making offensive material.”
In the end, Moberg decided against publishing the report in The Patriot, which hit newsstands Jan. 25. He said yesterday that he regrets his decision but believed at the time that it was an “internal case.”
TNR to reprint TNR editors made the decision to pull the remaining issues from campus only hours after they were delivered. They plan to reprint the edition, with changes to several of the cited articles, using an additional $1,000 in funding that was pledged by Chris McGill, director of Student Activities, Leadership and Scholarship.
The group will print about half as many as they did originally. It will not be completely covered by the new funding, the editors said yesterday. However, the group plans to make up for it by scaling back the circulation of its upcoming editions. Once reprinted, the issue will stay, for the most part, the same. Only minor changes will be made to the articles, O’Reilly said. The main point of contention was the piece involving The Patriot, which was sent to print as an old draft, he said, rather than the headline in the story about President Aoun.
“Everyone figures it was the Aoun article that caused us to reprint and it wasn’t,” he said. “That’s the least of my worries.”
Nothing to worry about Moberg, on the other hand, said he didn’t think TNR staff had a lot to worry about in the first place. “I thought it was very well done. It was racy and a little controversial, but they’re a humor publication, and part of humor is being controversial,” he said.
– News staff writer Ricky Thompson contributed to this report.
