Saturday, May 19, 2007

Next time, use a blog

The editorial board of the Daily Bruin pulled no punches last week in attacking one of its lesser rivals.

The Advocate, an anti-abortion rights publication, had accused the Daily Bruin of acting as a front for the school administration's supposed disinformation campaign aimed at coercing pregnant students into abortions and saving the school the headache of taking pre-natal care seriously. Not so, said the Bruin's editorial.
If there were some way to be further from the truth, this Editorial Board would be surprised.

...

Students should be wary of accepting the views put forth by The Advocate until its writers start to take the facts seriously.
What's that they say about glass houses?

That same day, the Daily Bruin's front-page story heralded the student government's approval on an on-campus pub. Only problem was that it was not at all true.

The paper deserves credit for putting its correction on the front-page the following day, but it failed to explain the reason it got the story wrong -- reliance on a single anonymous source. It would be easy to dismiss this as an isolated occurence of a student journalist being lazy or making a rookie mistake. But then what would Judy Miller's excuse be?