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Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
On Monday, The Maine Campus published an article on a former University of Maine student, Matthew Cushing, and his confession to the triple homicide of his mother and step-family, and the arson of their home. His friends and classmates at this university met the article, perhaps expectedly, with tremendous anguish.
As the author of the article as well as the editor-in-chief of this newspaper, I feel that some mistakes were made in our coverage; mistakes that were borne out of solid intentions, but which resulted in an unbalanced, incomplete picture of Cushing.
This piece isn’t being written at anyone’s request. In fact, it is being written against the wishes of some of The Maine Campus editorial staff. They have a right: Nothing we did in covering the story was unethical or illegal.
It did contain errors. Cushing is 21 years old, not 22. He’s not a dropout: he took a semester off. The Facebook quote referring to him being a “rageholic” was not a glimpse into his mind. It’s a joke: probably a Simpson’s reference.
I don’t know if Matthew Cushing had a temper. I’ve never met him. What I do know is, from September 2005 until Feb. 22, 2008, he was indistinguishable from the rest of us.
He was a student, taking classes, studying for exams, probably wishing the weather might get better. He likely spent time complaining about commons food and tagging pictures of his friends on Facebook. He may have sat where you are sitting right now. He may have been the kid in your seminar class holding the door open as you were leaving. And yet, he is the confessed killer of his own mother, his step-father and his 15-year-old half-brother.
It is undoubtedly one of the most horrific acts imaginable. And while we reported the facts of what happened, as revealed by police and court documents, as accurately as we could, we did not get to the human aspect of this tragedy: that someone just like us has done the unthinkable.
This crime affects his friends, his teachers, the people who knew him. I could not fit their tragedy into the simple facts of what Matthew Cushing did. The newspaper should have asked. It didn’t.
The result is the kind of article we often see in the media: a simplified, black-and-white demonization of “bad people,” usually paired with the easy, fluffy treatment of the “good people.” Nothing can excuse the brutal act that Cushing committed; but everywhere you look, people are reduced to monsters or superstars, and it takes us further away from what it means to be complicated and human.
Mistakes in judgement were made. We wanted to show a photo of Cushing as a human being and former student instead of showing the mug shot of a confessed killer. In that process, we used a photo a friend had taken without the individual’s permission or even the courtesy of a heads up. This, understandably, caused the person tremendous stress and anguish. We wanted to show Cushing as a real person, but we should have had more respect to the complexity of what would have happened to the people on the other side of that camera.
I do not want to appear as if I am apologizing for Cushing. I do not want to cough up the old trope that he is misunderstood, or to offer him pity or forgiveness. What I want to say is this: My coverage, and the coverage this newspaper generated, did not get our readers any closer to understanding how a fellow student could do something as destructive as what he has done, or how unimaginable this tragedy is to the people who know him. On that count, I failed. The media – in this case, me – has a responsibility to make something this overwhelming into something we can begin to comprehend. I didn’t.
We have held off on additional stories for this issue because we want to get a complete, accurate picture. We will be posting stories online over break, and will have additional coverage in print after break. I hope it will stand on its own as a way of clarifying the human dimension of this story.
Eryk Salvaggio is the editor in chief of The Maine Campus.
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