MOST PEOPLE know that newspapers are supposed to present the news in an unbiased manner. When it comes to the News page, conflict of interest rules are pretty easy to understand. If Bob Smith's senator brother is involved in a political scandal, Bob Smith shouldn't write the story. But when it comes to the Opinion page, the guidelines for conflict of interest are murkier.
The essential difference between news and opinion writing is also easy to understand. News stories seek to inform, without making any judgment on the topic. Opinion columns seek to persuade, clearly making a judgment on the topic. Thus, in one sense, every opinion column is biased. But let's get away from defining bias as the injection of opinion. In column writing, there is another kind of bias, and it has to do with the motives of the writer.
Let's say that a University professor was fired following an ugly public battle with the administration over an incendiary lecture. Let's say that professor had a daughter who was a columnist for The Cavalier Daily, and she decided to write a column in defense of her father. Even if that columnist had the most logical, rational reasons for defending her father's behavior, her motives would be suspect. Readers would think that she defended him because he was her father, and they would be less likely to seriously consider her argument. That's the best-case scenario. In the worst case, she sits down at her computer, blood boiling, and bangs out a nasty, anti-administration diatribe that is poorly reasoned and unworthy of newsprint. Either way, the readers aren't well served.
Columnists should be bound by the same conflict of interest rules that apply to their reporting colleagues. I should point out that mine isn't the only school of thought on the matter. Some argue that a columnist who is intimately acquainted with a subject will have more insightful things to say about it than someone who is just a bystander. That's a good point, and I think exceptions can be made. As a general rule, however, columnists should stick to topics on which they are well-informed, but with which they are not too closely bound.
Case in point: Preston Lloyd's Feb 19 column, "Fine line between support and slander." Lloyd, who is a Student Council committee chairman as well as a Cavalier Daily columnist, takes issue with the newspapers stories about the Student Council presidential race -- the same topic I wrote about last week.
Lloyd criticizes the newspaper, accusing it of slandering Council President Micah Schwartz and presidential candidate Ed Hallen. He accuses the newspaper of disenfranchising students from their own self-governance, and then accuses the current and former Managing Boards of anti-Council bias. He makes some points that I agree with, and which I wrote about earlier this week. But I don't feel that Lloyd's column should have been printed. Parts of his column devolve into laudation of Schwartz -- the head of an organization Lloyd belongs to -- and part of it borders on petulance at The Cavalier Daily's lack of recognition of the work Student Council committees do -- Student Council committees like the one Lloyd chairs.
At this point, it doesn't matter how valid his points are or how eloquently he phrased them. Lloyd is an independent Cavalier Daily columnist, and his space should not be used to advertise the work of another organization he belongs to.
Keeping Life free of ads
On Friday, the paper ran what I feel is another advertisement, this time on its Life page. The story about the Charlottesville sex shop should not have been a feature but a straight news story that focused on the city ordinance issues surrounding the store's arrival. That aspect was not even touched upon until more than halfway down the story. The fact that a sex shop exists is not news. Stores have been around for a long time, and so have sex toys. The news is in the community's response to the store, and with a sex store opening in a conservative town, there's bound to be enough response to write about.
But the first 14 paragraphs of this story focused on gratuitous descriptions of what the store sells and constituted little more than a titillating advertisement. If you want to write ads, go into marketing. If you want to titillate, write for a tabloid. Neither belongs on a news-content page in a respectable newspaper.
The story mentions that the store prompted a flurry of debates over city ordinance laws but never explains what they were. That should have been the focus of the story. Where there's a debate, there are two sides, but I didn't see them in this story. Little news, lots of free publicity.
What do you think? Drop me a line.
(Masha Herbst can be reached at ombud
@cavalierdaily.com.)
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