by Emily Huntington
Horizon Editor
Imagine one evening, winding down after a long day, checking your Twitter account and noticing a sudden, unusual increase in popularity. I’ve always said that nothing exciting ever happens on campus. That was before a couple weekends ago, and before last week when Kiro 7 showed up on campus.
One of the Horizon’s reporters, Gennette Cordova, was involved in a scandal that has been, in my opinion, taken way out of proportion. My e-mail inbox was fuller than it’s ever been – reporters from all over the country wanting to get in touch with me, her, or someone who knew her. By this point, all I knew about the situation was that she wanted us to remove her name from the bylines on our website. She told our adviser that she wouldn’t be coming to class anymore (she can’t officially withdraw because the deadline passed).We would only find out later the reason why.
One reporter went so far as to find my address and show up on my doorstep. While I admire her determination, I really didn’t appreciate hearing about this later on.
As her editor, I sort of have to be in the middle, whether I like it or not. I’m not the type of person that relishes this sort of thing. I prefer to live a quiet, private life, so naturally I just wanted to be left out of it. Given my position, though, I couldn’t.
Never has the newsroom’s phone rang so many times. We received calls from the New York Times, Good Morning America, KGMI Radio, and some others. A correspondent from The Today Show came into our newsroom. People from the New York Post were sitting outside our newsroom waiting to see if she would show up. I received e-mails from just about as many people, and some others, all wanting to get Gennette’s side of the story.
Gennette issued a statement to the New York Daily News explaining that she has never met Rep. Anthony Weiner, though she is a fan of his, nor has she ever been to New York or Washington D.C.
While it should have stopped there, it hasn’t. She’s being referred to as the ‘Seattle Snooki,’ and she’s being criticized for not doing interviews. I admire her strength through this, because if it were me, I’d have lost my head by now. But as her friends say, she was born for this. She’s strong enough to get through it her way.
Why would she want her name removed from her work? Isn’t that really peculiar?
If you’re a journalist, or a student journalist (a distinction w/o a difference), and you receive a picture of a congressman in a compromising position, is your first instinct to drop out of one of your college classes and eliminate everything about yourself?
She’s shown a particular comfort with being online, even now. She doesn’t seem to mind the publicity very much. So why did she act like she had something to hide?
It’s also pretty odd she was having private discussions with Weiner about what we know now to be ‘Ethel’, a minor below age of sexual consent talking to Weiner about … something … privately. No idea what, because she deleted those conversations and publicaly promised Weiner to keep her mouth shut.
If Cordova knows more about what a US Congressman was doing, she should write about it here.