A Cursor journalist sues TU Eindhoven

In legal proceedings, Cursor editor Bridget Spoor demands that the blacked out sections in an investigative report about censorship are made public. This was reported by Cursor, the journalism platform of TU Eindhoven. In the report, an investigative committee writes that the Executive Board stood in the way of ‘free journalistic operations’.

Five segments of sentences were blacked out in the 47 page report. Spoor’s lawyer, Martine Lem, says that these contain crucial information. “Part of the context of the report is lost without full publication,” she told Cursor.

The reason for the report is an allegation of censorship on the part of the Executive Board that Spoor reported in June 2023. She says that the then Editor in Chief, Han Konings, did not feel free to publish a critical article that she wrote, in part because the Executive Board is said to have put him under pressure. When Spoor filed her allegation, Cursor and the Executive Board had been in conflict for a while. This had gained national attention when the media outlet was censored after the Executive Board had suspended Konings.

Irregularities

In the report (in Dutch) which was recently made public, the Committee at TU Eindhoven stated that, after an 11 month long investigation, Spoor’s accusation was founded. While the Committee says that there was no ‘unjustifiable interference beforehand’ or ‘systematic censoring’, there were ‘irregularities’ and ‘malpractice’. Among the advice issued to the Executive Board is to maintain ‘professional distance’ from the journalistic content.

• Do you want to know exactly what happened? Cursor has listed all the events of the last few years.

The report features several cases, including the events in June 2021 around a series of articles about negative behaviour at the academic institution in Eindhoven. The last article in the series, in which an anonymous doctoral candidate claims that he was blackmailed, led to a clash between Konings and Executive Board Chair Robert-Jan Smits shortly before publication. The investigation report states that in a meeting with the Executive Board, Konings was told that he has a ‘flawed moral compass’ and that he would be ‘thrown out’ by the Executive Board. Konings decided not to publish the third article, but things did not improve between him and the Executive Board.

‘It has now been acknowledged that our Editorial Office has undergone excessive obstruction in our reporting freedom’

Bypassed

The report also says that the Executive Board bypassed Konings when he wanted to suggest new members for the Editorial Council, a body that monitors the journalistic actions of Cursor. The Executive Board rejected Konings’ suggestions to then put forward names of its own. According to the Editorial Office’s Statutes, the Executive Board has the right to do this. That said, its actions deviate ‘from the way things were done in previous years’.

In an interview with Villamedia (in Dutch), Interim Editor in Chief Roy op het Veld says that the Editorial Office’s Statutes were the source of the conflict. The Statutes say that Cursor should have weighed up the ‘interests of the university’ in its publications. For the Editorial Office, this means that they can operate in journalistic independence. ‘But you can also interpret “the interests of the university” to mean the reputation of the institution’, says Op het Veld. For the Executive Board, it meant that the Editorial Office ‘can never operate absolutely independently as a daily newspaper can’. Op het Veld says that the new Editorial Statute that is currently being drafted says the sentence about the interests of the university is being replaced with a message saying that the Editorial Office is in the service of the entire TU Eindhoven community.

Satisfied

While they still resist the blacked out passages, Spoor is satisfied with the conclusions of the investigation. In a statement on LinkedIn, she writes: ‘There is now recognition that in our Editorial Office roles were excessively obstructed in our freedom of reporting by the Technical University of Eindhoven and that the management, and by extension the employer, created a socially unsafe working environment and little action was taken to stop this.’

In a response to Cursor, the Executive Board of TU Eindhoven says that it welcomes ‘the recommendations, which support the path that we have taken with Cursor’. ‘The Executive Board would also like to emphasise that there was no systematic censoring or unreasonable interference.’

Delta’s Editorial Office experienced a similar situation after the publication of an investigative article about TU Delft’s Innovation & Impact Centre. After legal summons in which Saskia Bonger, the Editor in Chief, was held personally financially liable for any damages, the Editorial Office took the article offline under protest. The Editorial Office is currently working on quickly republishing it, accompanied by an article about what happened.