STUDENTS have been voting for new officials for Student Council and other bodies of student government since Friday. Hopefully, those students felt capable of making informed decisions after reading The Cavalier Daily last week.
The newspaper provided election coverage on the News page and in Wednesday's Focus section. But some of the best information on the candidates and the referenda on the ballot showed up in the Managing Board's endorsements, which ran throughout the week on the Opinion page.
Endorsements in student elections can create some uncomfortable situations for a student newspaper -- something I learned from personal experience at North Carolina State University. Candidates who don't receive the paper's endorsement naturally might wonder whether they will get fair news coverage. Candidates who win without the paper's endorsement may doubt the paper will cover them objectively during their terms in office.
Endorsements from student papers, however, serve a useful purpose. Other student groups endorse candidates in campus elections, but few likely know their positions on issues as well as the student paper. In Monday's editorial ("A note on endorsements," Feb. 21), the Managing Board wrote that it based its endorsements on 15- to 20-minute interviews open to all candidates. In addition, the board is probably more familiar with the candidates and issues than average students because the paper regularly writes about student government.
Nothing I saw in The Cavalier Daily's news coverage last week suggested a bias toward any of the candidates the Managing Board endorsed, showing a clear line between the Managing Board and the News department. The Board also wrote the endorsements in a professional manner, sometimes criticizing candidates' positions and credentials but never in a way that seemed too personal.
For readers who wanted to learn about candidates without reading the Managing Board's opinion of them, The Cavalier Daily published a voter's guide in the Focus section. The guide contained background information on candidates and gave them an opportunity to answer a few questions in their own words.
The Cavalier Daily did fall a bit flat in its coverage of last week's debates. Tuesday's article about the Student Council representative and executive candidate debates ("UBE sponsors Student Council debates," Feb. 22) had to cover a lot of ground, but it didn't reveal much about individual candidates' platforms. And an e-mailer told me he was disappointed the paper missed the debates for the UJC and Honor candidates. Better coverage of those debates would have helped readers distinguish between candidates.
Aside from the debate coverage, The Cavalier Daily gave University students some excellent tools to use when completing their ballots.
Balance on the Sports page
When I was sports editor at another ACC school's paper, I always tried to give as much coverage as possible to sports other than football and men's basketball. I believed in recognizing the accomplishments of the gymnasts and wrestlers and soccer players on my campus because students needed to know about them. I admittedly treated football and men's basketball as "first among equals," but I made sure someone on staff covered every varsity sport.
Since I took this job, I always thought The Cavalier Daily's Sports staff shared that philosophy, which impressed me. So I was a little surprised when I got an e-mail last week criticizing the paper's coverage of women's basketball.
The e-mailer pointed out that Monday's Sports page featured an article, a column and a photo on men's basketball's loss to Maryland. Meanwhile, the women upset a ranked opponent at home, but the article on the game appeared at the bottom of the page wedged in between stories on early season games in men's lacrosse and baseball. The e-mailer went on to cite a couple of similar cases in which the Sports staff displayed a loss for the men more prominently than a win for the women.
The Sports editors told me they choose the lead story for the day based on a number of factors, including reader interest, whether a sport has received adequate coverage recently and the postseason implications of a game. The editors said winning and losing have little effect on story placement and that they try hard not to make the top story about the same sport every day.
Playing armchair editor for a second, I probably would have featured one or two of those wins for the women's team instead of another loss for the men because the women are having an excellent season. But no current sports story interests readers more than the men's team and the status of its coach. In most cases, that story has to take precedence.
Looking at back at what The Cavalier Daily has done on the Sports page this year, I'm convinced more than ever that the paper is committed to covering every varsity sport. Editors, however, cannot downplay the biggest story in their coverage area, and right now, that story for the Sports department is the men's basketball team's poor performance.
Jeremy Ashton can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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