We endorsed candidates for homecoming king and queen last week.
We expected our entrance into the fiercely partisan arena of homecoming politics might be controversial in some way, but not exactly in the ways it turned out to be. So for this issue’s Weekly, we’re going to try and set some things straight about what we’re doing over here at your family-friendly, yet tactfully edgy, campus newspaper.
First, there is a difference the size of Chesterton’s waistline between the News section and Opinions section of any newspaper, including ours. The News section reports facts and narratives, and we strive to keep its content unbiased. No journalism can be entirely objective since, as the venerable Hunter S. Thompson once said, the two are contradictory terms. But we do our best.
Each article on the Opinions page, however, represents nothing more than the opinion of whoever’s byline sits atop the copy. That includes this Weekly, which is the collective opinion of our seven editors (see above byline). It also includes anything or anyone we feel like endorsing, such as homecoming candidates.
This brings us to our second point. There is apparently a belief circulating on campus that we’re supposed to write things everyone agrees with. That statement is simply not true. We’ll publish anything on our Opinions page so long as it’s well-written, tasteful, and promotes campus discussion. All the opinions that are fit to print, to paraphrase The New York Times.
If we, the editors of your (relatively) grammatically correct college rag, set out to aggregate the political opinions on this campus and avoid controversy, you’d end up seeing a paper on Thursday mornings with personality as stunning as a neo-con bowl of rice.
Nobody wants a neo-con bowl of rice.
We take that idea and apply it to all aspects of the Opinions page, whether it’s about the core, or CCA speakers, or, yes, even homecoming candidates.
The Collegian is your newspaper, but we are the editors who run it. What we want to print, we print. What we don’t, we don’t. Them’s the rules, and if you don’t like what’s printed, come write for us (anyone can!). Or go read the Forum.
