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Opinion
 

Staff Editorial

                        Robyn Morrow             Chris Elliott                        Mark Suarez
                                               John Arterbury       Caitlin Cuppernull

Princeton parody not laughing matter 

The Daily Princetonian's staff isn't laughing now. 

Princeton University's student newspaper staff is under fire for publishing a spoof issue Jan. 17 titled "The Gaily Printsanything" and faces legal action from some of its targets, the Student Press Law Center reported.

The issue included an article describing a romantic rendezvous between a professor and a gay prostitute and a column about an Asian applicant who filed a complaint with the university after being rejected, the SPLC reported.

Editors at The Daily Princetonian should have thought more carefully about the spoof issue's content before they chose to publish it.

While the publication was clearly a parody of events occurring in the Princeton community, editors should have realized the sensitivity of the subjects they wrote about and kept that in mind.

In the column satirizing the rejected Asian applicant, the writer used broken English and wrote under the name Lian Ji. 

The real-life applicant who made the complaint is Jian Li. 

As student leaders, those on the newspapers' staff should do their best to be sensitive to racial stereotypes rather than furthering them.

Although editor in chief Chanakya Sethi told The Associated Press he hoped the controversy would create dialogue on campus, he should have realized that some of the issue's content had no reason to be published. 

What may be funny to some is offensive to others. 

Sethi should have remembered his publication exists to report news concerning the Princeton community, not as a venue to poke fun at others.