One of the more important things a newspaper does is cover news stories about politics and politicians. In order for people to be able to engage with the political process and know what is at stake in various debates as well as who is debating we need information and perspective. I feel like The Cavalier Daily does a good job overall when it comes to covering politics. It has a lot to cover too, from student elections and government to local, state and occasionally national politics. In addition to news stories, Opinion pieces and endorsements are also an important part of political coverage in The Cavalier Daily.
Maintaining balance in news coverage is critical for making sure those Opinion pieces and endorsements carry weight. Allegations of bias are raised in virtually every article with political content, it seems. Most of those allegations are entirely off base. At times, though, the appearance of possible bias is a problem and most of the time it’s a lack of careful, balanced coverage that leads to that appearance.
For example, as I read the paper, I noted an article last week about a local attorney declaring his candidacy for Charlottesville City Council. To be honest, it read a bit like a press release from his campaign but the reality is there likely wasn’t much else to include in such an article. It wasn’t an analysis of his platform; it was brief coverage of his announcement of candidacy. In that it was simply coverage of an announcement and certainly newsworthy there was no inherent bias in the article. However, at least two other people have declared their candidacy for City Council and I don’t recall seeing a similar piece about their announcements or the fact of their candidacies at all. That’s a lack of balance that could lead some readers to conclude The Cavalier Daily is biased toward this particular candidate. And those readers are then likely to dismiss anything in the Opinion pages having to do with that election.
Now, the reality about the lack of balance could be due to something as simple as the other candidates announcing their candidacy before classes were in session when the paper wasn’t publishing. Or it could be that I simply can’t find the articles on the website. There remain significant problems with many pages on the site and the search feature is still essentially useless. This is going to become a problem as we move into both student and local government elections, especially City Council. As The Cavalier Daily recently reported, there is a new Student Council-City Council liaison position.That article, though, shows up on neither the Grounds news page, nor the Local news page nor the Student Council news page. I have noted the tech issues in the past as more of an annoyance than anything else but in trying to find information about City Council I realized that those issues affect the whole of the work The Cavalier Daily staff is doing. Even if there is good balance in covering the various candidates for City Council, it is virtually impossible to find it in any way that makes sense. Fixing these issues needs to be a top priority. Part of what the new Managing Board wants to do is galvanize students to action and those students will need to be able to access this information if that is going to happen.
Another way The Cavalier Daily can help readers is by carefully identifying people who write Opinion pieces about candidates or elections. Some disclosures are obvious: campaign managers or volunteers for a candidate or the head of the University Democrats writing a piece endorsing a Democrat for City Council. Other kinds of disclosure should be considered. Formal political relationships aren’t the only thing that would affect how a reader might think about an op-ed piece. Whether the writer is a fraternity brother or sorority sister of the candidate or a co-chair of a CIO might be relevant in a particular race.
Political coverage is a critical element in The Cavalier Daily’s work. In order to make it as useful and robust as it can be the staff needs to take care to be balanced. Doing so will ensure that the news coverage is informative and that the Opinion side of the paper has a platform to present arguments effectively. Beyond that, the balanced coverage must be discoverable and that means technical issues have to get fixed.
Christopher Broom is the Public Editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at publiceditor@cavalierdaliy.com or on Twitter at @cdpubliceditor.
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