Senator,
editor biased show through, hurt campus
media
Sterling Harris
Last week the Associated Students Senate ap-pointed four candidates to the Student
Media Board out of a total of seven applicants.
The confirmation process was
highly contentious, with different factions vying for control over campus media.
The controversy centered on the Long Beach Union and the role it played in last
year’s Associated Students, Inc. presidential
elections.
Last year’s election between current President Jamie Pollock and then-ASI
Sen. Uduak-Joe Ntuk became quite nasty, as both candidates were guilty of numerous
infractions.
What seemed to tip the scales in Pollock’s favor however was
the Union’s election edition, which featured one news article and three
editorials attacking Ntuk.
Such overt bias is a disgrace to this university. Reporting the truth, regardless
of who it offends, is an important function of campus media.
Unfortunately, Patrick
Dooley, the current editor in chief of the Union, cannot tell the difference
between “hard-to-digest… accurate reporting” and opinion.
In
the Sept. 26 issue of the Union, Sen. Guido D’Onofrio lambasted any attempt
to promote balance in the weekly paper, saying the Union staff is a judge of
balance and acceptable content far superior to any group of officials.”
What the senator may not realize is because student fees support publications
like the Union, all students should be able to take part in ensuring that the
media
on campus remain balanced.
By devoting their entire election edition to attacking one candidate, the Union
staff has proven they are not a “superior judge of balance.”
The
concerned students who applied for positions on the Student Media Board wanted
nothing more than to prevent such a flagrant misuse of power from happening again.
These views are dismissed as “radical” by D’Onofrio.
He goes on to claim, “It is absurd for student representatives to advocate
imposing their personal conceptions of balance upon the“Union’s content.”
What
he does not realize is that a group of students are imposing their own “personal
conceptions of balance” upon the Union’s content right now, and that
group is the Union staff itself.
The Union staff in no way represents the wide range of opinions on this campus,
and they have proven their own bias against ASI candidates in the past.
It seems
as though D’Onofrio and others have unilaterally decided which student
groups should and should not be involved with
campus media.
When D’Onofrio says, “The campus media is an instrument
of our students’ free speech,” one has to wonder just which students
he is talking about.
Sterling Harris is a sophomore electrical engineering and applied mathematics
major.
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