Excellence in Journalism: The Expanded Universe

Building upon Pablo Hidalgo's blog posts about journalistic faux pas, here's a good one. In a Newsarama.com post on the new Legacy series from Dark Horse Comics, the author quotes artist Jan Duursema as follows:

"We spent long hours discussing the return of the Sith Order," she posted on the Dark Horse boards. "We analysed the problem in great detail, and it is not conflict with George Lucas' vision of Star Wars. Even Lucas approved the basics of the story and he still thinks that the Expanded Universe isn't just an alternative universe which is different from his own. The Legacy series will not ruin the significance of the Prophecy and Anakin Skywalker's redemption. You really think that we didn't think about this and we missed it???"

As we all know, Lucas does think the EU is an alternate, parallel universe . . . or at least he says so all the time. However, a small-but-loud group of EU-phile fans rejects that fact, and as soon as I saw the quote I could already imagine their attempts to elevate this Dark Horse artist above Lucas's own words.

But if you follow the broken link given at Newsarama (here is a fixed one), you find something interesting. The quote actually comes from a fan who asked to be told this to assuage his/her fears regarding Legacy. The Dark Horse artist simply quoted it back and said "Feel better now? :D"

In other words, that's not exactly a quote of Jan Duursema's opinion, and yet it was presented as such. Maybe it conforms and maybe it doesn't, but we don't know based on what we have there.

Of course, folks like me would rather just take the info from the top dog anyway.