Portrayal of Advocate Unfair and Unfounded

To the editors:

I was intrigued by Jacqueline Newmyer's assertion that the "The Devil's Advocate" (FM, Oct. 7) was a "representative" account of the "power-plays" and "real-life drama" that take place on Harvard's extracurricular terrain. It is no coincidence that the manner in which FM went about writing the article was as "representative" of the extra-curricular "power plays" and "drama" which it ascribed to the Advocate. I and other members of the Advocate Executive Board declined to comment.

Having only access to the basic outline of the events she purported to describe Newmyer chose to compensate what her article lacked in substance with defamatory sensationalism: "at one point last spring, a flash-flood of resignation offers almost washed the Advocate away." Since Newmyer herself writes in the article's postscript that everybody privy to the Advocate Executive Board's proceedings last spring declined to comment it is hard to see how Newmyer is justified in fabricating fictitious renditions of those proceedings based on the bogus authority of "sources", "observers" and "veteran Advocate editors." Newmyer even has the audacity to invent psychological insights for her protagonists:

"Soudavar emerged repentant and still convinced that the Advocate needed his leadership. Humbled but not disheartened, he would retain his post at the helm." Some of Newmyer's speculations arise from her own imagination without even throwing so much as a glance askance at the standards of responsible journalism.

FM accuses the Advocate of a kind of collective artistic pretension. It seems that FM's hell-bent desire to be sensational at the expense of objectivity has blinded it to the fact that the faults we find in others are often are own.

Saadi Soudavar '00

Oct. 13, 1999