An online comment about last week's ombudsman column gives me an opportunity to repeat one of my favorite rants about opinions and who they belong to. It also gives me the opportunity to encourage careful reading.
First, the rant. Someone identified online as "bob" seemed to take issue with everything connected to last week's column except, perhaps, my name and title.
"Next," bob typed, "the Cav Daily will be advocating that students not hold their school responsible for the quality of their own education, throwing in a quote by Jefferson on how much he loved browsing books in his library."
All readers need to know that my column does not represent the opinion of The Cavalier Daily, its staff, their parents or anyone else except me. That's what columns are, columnists' opinions.
It's a common mistake. Some people seem to think that anything that appears in any newspaper is the opinion of the staff or the publisher or the corporation that owns the printing press. Those people are mistaken. Opinions of all sorts do - and should - appear on newspapers' editorial pages and on their adjacent opinion pages. It's part of that market place of ideas that Mr. Jefferson endorsed so heartily.
Letters to the editor represent the opinions of the people who signed those letters. Many letters published in The Cavalier Daily and other newspapers take issue with other letter writers or with something that appeared in the paper. So it should be easy to tell that those aren't the opinion of the newspaper, unless the newspaper is beset with multiple personalities that don't like each other very much.
Columns, as I said before, are the opinions of the columnists who wrote them. Again, in many newspapers, it's easy to find columnists who disagree with each other, with letter-to-the-editor writers and with the editorials with which they sometimes share pages. For years, The Wall Street Journal, the most conservative major newspaper in the United States, employed a socialist as a columnist. The Wall Street Journal, so far as I know, has never supported a socialist's position on anything.
Newspapers do have opinions and newspapers do express them. They do that in editorials. Columns are not editorials. Neither are letters to the editor. The Cavalier Daily's editorials are those things printed on the left hand side of the editorial page, beneath the picture of Jefferson's statue, beneath a Jefferson quote about reason and truth and error, and beneath a list of The Cavalier Daily's leaders. The Cavalier Daily should be held responsible for opinions that appear over there. But all the letters and columns the newspaper prints are simply the result of The Cavalier Daily giving the rest of us room to talk. The same thing goes for the space for comments on The Cavalier Daily's Web site.
That's where bob wrote, "We pay good money to this school and our security is the first thing we expect in return. This is the kind of story I've come to expect from the Cav Daily. Pure drivel." He also chastises me for leaning too heavily on Mr. Jefferson's pronouncements.
"In 2009," bob wrote, "quoting Jefferson can't get you through every argument."
Perhaps bob is right about my drivel, but I would have expected that the first thing bob would expect from the University is an education. And I would have expected that the pursuit of an education at the University would have taught bob to be a careful reader. Apparently, I was wrong on both counts.
Though I often quote Thomas Jefferson, I didn't do that in the column bob addresses. Mr. Jefferson, of course, was author of the Declaration of Independence and of Virginia's statute for religious freedom and founder of the University. He is often called a founding father of the United States. The founding father I quoted last week was Ben Franklin, who advised us that a penny saved is a penny earned and that necessity never made a good bargain. The Thomas I quoted in that column was Thomas Jackson, a professor at Virginia Military Institute and an officer in the United States and Confederate armies, though not all at the same time.
Tim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily's ombudsman.
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