Sarasota Herald-Tribune Deletes Op-Ed By Proud Boy Wife After Backlash — But Doesn’t Address Major Conflict

Photo by EVA MARIE UZCATEGUI/AFP via Getty Images.

Publishing online means media outlets can edit or even delete articles that ruffle feathers, but screenshots and internet archives mean there’s a trail of evidence. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune attempted to memory hole an op-ed published on Sunday that defended the Proud Boys as simply “caring fathers,” without disclosing that the author was married to a member of the group.

The original op-ed was titled “Attacking Proud Boys does a disservice to caring school parents” and written by Melissa Radovich, who was identified at the end as merely “a mother who lives in the Sarasota County Schools district and…an executive at an area manufacturing education company.” The article was deleted as some point Monday morning and is no longer available at the original link, but was captured in its entirety by the Wayback Machine’s archives.

And without apology or retraction, the @HeraldTribune has removed this embarrassment from their website completely. @rumpfshaker was the first national media to call them out. I hope more follow. https://t.co/ijYn3hugd3 pic.twitter.com/PPMJDtC9eC

— WTFlorida 🌻✊🏾🇺🇦 (@what_the_fla) July 11, 2022

As Mediaite reported Sunday evening, the op-ed never disclosed that Radovich’s husband Nicholas Radovich is a member of the Proud Boys, information that should have been readily available to the Herald-Tribune’s editors. In addition to the multiple images of Radovich and her husband attending Proud Boy rallies and waving Proud Boy flags that were on publicly available social media accounts, the op-ed was written to respond to a June 24 guest column by Lisa Gialdini Schurr that expressly identified “Proud Boy Nicholas Radovich, and his wife, Melissa Radovich.”

Here she is waiving the flag of traitors. 4/7 pic.twitter.com/MBKXhgJaLj

— WTFlorida 🌻✊🏾🇺🇦 (@what_the_fla) July 10, 2022

The backlash to Radovich’s op-ed was intense, both for the newspaper’s decision to publish it in the first place and for the failure to disclose Radovich’s marriage to a Proud Boy.

Just before 11:00 am ET, the Herald-Tribune finally published a message to their readers from executive editor Jennifer Orsi addressing the controversy. The paper had “erred” in publishing Radovich’s op-ed, she wrote. According to Orsi, an unnamed editor felt it was “fair to give [Radovich] a chance to respond” to Schurr’s June 24 column.

“However,” Orsi continued, “the Herald-Tribune opinion page will not provide a forum for support of the Proud Boys, an extremist group that promotes white nationalist views, has been labeled a terrorist group by two countries, and has top members under indictment on charges of seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. To do so is antithetical to our values as an organization and is outside of our responsibility to provide a fair forum for different points of view.”

Radovich’s op-ed “did not meet our standards,” she wrote, and pledged that the Herald-Tribune was “adding additional, higher level review of the process for accepting and editing guest columns for publication.”

“We will continue to publish varied opinions from across the political spectrum on important local issues,” she concluded. “But this decision fell short of our standards, and we apologize to our readers.”

Orsi never directly addressed the Herald-Tribune’s failure to disclose Radovich’s marriage to a Proud Boy.

Prof. Clay Calvert, a professor at both the University of Florida’s College of Law and the College of Journalism and Communications who has taught journalism ethics in the past, told Mediaite that the controversy over this op-ed “goes to prove the point that newspapers need to do some background research in terms of who is writing guest columns and opinion columns before they’re published, into who the author is.”

“Readers have a right to know if there are any conflicts of interest,” Calvert continued. “That’s the key here, that if readers knew the source of the column, then they could discount its credibility” if there was a reason for bias.

“Here the conflict was being married to a Proud Boy,” he noted. “It seems pretty clear.” He remarked while it might have been “fair” for the Herald-Tribune to publish the “other side,” letting Radovich respond to Schurr’s criticism of her, “but there needs to be some transparency.”

Mediaite reached out to Orsi and several other members of the Herald-Tribune editorial staff for comment but did not receive a reply.

After reading Orsi’s message to readers, Calvert sent a follow up comment. “The paper is to be lauded for eventually recognizing a failure in its editorial review process,” he said. “It would now be helpful for it to articulate specifically what the ‘higher level review’ process entails.”

UPDATE 12:10 pm ET: A Herald-Tribune spokesperson just replied to Mediaite, sending the following statement by email and a link to Orsi’s letter to readers: “The Herald-Tribune erred Sunday in publishing a guest column by Melissa Radovich with the headline ‘Attacking Proud Boys does disservice to caring parents.'”

UPDATE 12:15 pm ET: The Herald-Tribune spokesperson emailed again to say that the quote should be attributed to Orsi.