The public editor seeks to be the liaison between campus media and their readers. As Public Editor, I hope to advance a campus conversation on Tufts media, bringing forward important issues we often take for granted and putting issues in new contexts that challenge the way we get our news.
Now in its second year, the Public Editor works under the Media Advocacy Board as an ombudsman for all campus media outlets. This semester, I will write weekly in the Daily, blog regularly at tuftsroundtable.org/publiceditor, tweet from time to time at @TuftsMedia and maybe pop up in other places around campus. I intend to field comments from the community and will do my best to relay questions and answers to and from campus editorial boards.
I do not want to bash one publication all the time, and I do not want to be seen as objective; like all informed audiences, I have my own opinions. Rather, I hope the Public Editor becomes an independent voice in the campus media that audiences and editorial boards can trust to provide a fresh perspective.
The Daily failed to live up to one of journalism's greatest responsibilities and take advantage of one of its greatest opportunities in its coverage of the 2009 Tufts Community Union (TCU) presidential election: to challenge the status quo and uncover the beauties and the beasts of our campus community.
Specifically, in its editorial endorsing then-junior Brandon Rattiner, the election's eventual winner, the Daily neglected to even mention one of the candidates, then-sophomore Samia Zahran. Only Rattiner and then-sophomore Chas Morrison were compared and touted for their experience and leadership skills.
Forgive me for reviving this issue five months after the fact. But I considered this an important oversight from last semester's Daily editorial board, providing important lessons for the future.
In its editorial, the Daily reflected what many considered at the time to be the status quo, the mainstream idea that only Morrison and Rattiner made viable candidates for the presidency. And although the Senate duly nominated all three candidates, it is within the editorial board's discretion to discredit one of the candidates running. Rather, the Daily missed an opportunity to editorialize on important issues on campus, reflecting a hyper-politicized campus mainstream the Daily is often quick to criticize.
One reaction to this criticism is that national publications often do not consider third-party candidates in their endorsements, and television networks only invite frontrunners to debates. But too often we compare our political and media networks to their national counterparts, comparisons that are always false. Not only is the scope entirely different, but also Rattiner and Morrison were not backed by decades of party histories that legitimize the dominance of the Democrats and the Republicans in national electoral politics. Are we really a campus that assigns national partisanship to its student leaders?
Indeed, the Daily's editorial board has often criticized the hyper-politicized Senate taking itself too seriously, notably in "A questionable allocation" from April 7 on the decision to fund the Trips Cabin at the Loj and "A botched election" from April 10 on the recount of the 2012 Senate seats. In its presidential endorsement, the Daily's editorial board mirrored the elitism of the Senate they found pernicious in other editorials.
Win or lose, one of the most exciting parts about running for TCU president is the ability to affect campus debate around important issues and bring new debates to the fore. I think Zahran did a wonderful job of doing just that, raising controversial and important issues — if narrow in scope — about race and campus climate that would likely not have been explored to the same degree had she not included those issues in her platform. The editorial board lost a wonderful opportunity to comment on the importance of those issues when it wrote her out of the election.
Perhaps the editorial board didn't think Zahran had the experience to lead the Senate. Or maybe it didn't think her ideas were fresh. Or maybe it didn't think race and campus climate are important. We don't know, because it didn't explain its thinking.
A wonderfully thoughtful editorial could have highlighted the importance of Zahran's platform while endorsing someone else. Or one editorial could have endorsed Rattiner while another evaluated Zahran's absence from the mainstream campus conversations about the election. Either way, her ideas merited at least some mention. But it's a new editorial board now and in the future, so we'll see how its perspective changes.
--
Duncan Pickard is a senior majoring in history. He is the Media Advocacy Board's public editor, and his opinions are strictly his own. He can be reached at
tuftspubliceditor@gmail.com, or through his blog at tuftsroundtable.org/publiceditor.
--
This article originally stated incorrectly that Brandon Rattiner was a senior when he ran in last year's Tufts Community Union Senate election. He was a junior. This was corrected on 10/6/2009.
