Press Club-Venezuelan students continue to have it out
To recap: Venezuelan Students Abroad had scheduled their panel for Friday, but Press Club officials nixed it when they discovered it wasn’t going to include a balanced set of viewpoints.
On Monday, Cristina Hernandez, president of the student group, sent a letter to NPC President Jerry Zremski, she calls the decision “disgraceful,” suggesting that “NPC unwittingly became an instrument of the Venezuelan Government to silence student critics. She finally asked him to reconsider the decision.
Zremski responded the same day with a letter of his own, taking Hernandez to task for the “inaccuracies and the unwarranted tone of your letter.”
“[U]nder the NPC’s standard for events it sponsors, any forum with multiple speakers must offer balanced points of view from all sides of the story,” he explains. “This event clearly did not do that. … We thought it was best to take a step back and postpone the event. We did not postpone the event because of the complaint we received from the Venezuelan embassy, and any implication that we did is an unwarranted assault on the good name of the National Press Club.”
Zremski then offers to reschedule as a balanced panel or as a “Newsmaker” event if only one person speaks.
In a letter to members the next day, he also notes that the club gave the students “the option of proceeding with the event as a paid news conference without Club sponsorship.”
