My smiling face is shining out from this page once again this week because I want to be absolutely clear about our intent and our behavior with regard to the ASUO election stories that are currently running every day in the Emerald. We have received some complaints and concerns (see below), and I want there to be no misunderstandings.
Given 17 races and more than 60 candidates to interview, we’ve had to condense. We took 15-30 minutes worth of interview and distilled it down to just a few inches for each person. We selected only a few of the questions to print, based on which received the most complete or involved answers from the candidates. Then we removed the “umms” and “uhs,” and fixed sentences that went nowhere. Then we shortened the interviews — often to less than one-third of their original size. We simply don’t have the space to print everything.
For the record, this process is exactly what journalists do every day — not just for ASUO elections. The art of news is to sort and sift, and to present, in a fair and balanced manner, the representative portions of events in the world, so that a six-hour “support the troops” rally, for instance, can be turned into a digestable news story.
The important thing, as recognized by the Supreme Court, is that reporters not distort the meaning or intent of the speaker by any cutting or “cleaning up” of the quotes. I stand by my staff in this case — we have not altered anyone’s meaning.
And don’t be fooled: Rarely do readers get a complete, original quote that is unaltered in every way. Often, newspapers use ellipses (“…”) to indicate where they have cut material out. We do that in regular stories. In Q&A interviews, however, we do not. It is our assumption that readers know full well they aren’t getting every noise uttered by the interviewee.
On our Web site, however, we have the full transcripts of the interviews. These are nearly verbatim. For clarity’s sake, we did remove the “umms” and “ahs,” and we did add punctuation to aid in understanding sentence fragments. To read these, go to www.dailyemerald.com, mouse-over the “News” link, and when the menu pops up, click on “ASUO elections.”
As I said earlier, we have received some complaints and concerns about the coverage. Some of this has to do with genuine errors on our part. For those, I apologize. Errors happen, and we regret that part of life. We will correct them as soon as we are informed of them (or recognize them ourselves).
I won’t print any of the complainant’s names, and here’s why: ASUO Elections Rules 2003, Section 6.12. The rule says that no candidate can use any campus resource to promote their candidacy if the other candidates can’t also have equal access to that resource.
What does all that mean? It means we don’t have the space in the newspaper to print comments and complaints from every candidate. So I am not allowing it from any candidate. Likewise with letters of endorsement: Candidates can have their friends write letters, but we will not print any signed by a candidate, because we can not guarantee the space to print one from every candidate.
I will tell you we received concerns about our editing, which led to my earlier explanations. The other concern we heard was anger or frustration with the two questions we had for finance senators regarding rules. Let me explain our thinking.
Rules were a concern for senators this year — not because anyone was grossly negligent or because the rules were abused, but because they do have an importance and sometimes they are confusing. So we wanted to see whether people were familiar with the senate rules.
We were careful, however, not to say whether this makes a candidate more or less qualified for office. Such a judgment is for readers to make. We do not necessarily believe a candidate is automatically more or less qualified because of their ability or inability to answer rules questions.
However, candidates expecting to win the right to spend millions of dollars in student fees shouldn’t balk at the idea of answering questions about the rules that govern the office for which they’re running. I’m sorry, but that’s what I think. This is politics. We were fair in our application of the questions, and we gave them very little space in the stories.
So concludes my explanation. Please continue to contact me with questions or concerns about our coverage. That’s what makes a newspaper part of the community.