Thank heaven for the crazies

There was a fantastic incident the other day at Yale in which a “mini-preacher,” as IvyGate calls him, took to the campus condemning basically everyone — but my personal favorites are “dirty dancers” and “gangster rappers.”

There’s no question my entire campus would be heading straight to the underworld, but at least Patrick Swayze and and Tupac are there waiting for me.

Controversial diversity

Another op-ed controversy.

In a faculty column, we added a definition of an obscure religious term with the intent to make the article accessible to all of our readership. I am still fully behind the decision, as leaving the term un-defined would have been insensitive. These are the sort of nuances that we are working to become more sensitive to in order to develop a better relationship with our campus. No assumptions are ever made, and everything is questioned.

Apparently, our decision was “condescending.” Apparently, everyone on my campus should know what it means. Apparently, it’s occasions like this that show society is going down the tubes.

Well cry me a river, buddy. I’ll continue to define anything that floats my boat.

It’s not our fault – Learn to read op-eds as op-eds

I don’t know how I will go about doing this, but I want to write a book called “It’s Not Our Fault: The Media’s Attempt to Make Readership Understand.”

There’s this whole movement for media reform. All right. That’s fine. But what I’m more a fan of is the push for media literacy. So much of what is misconstrued as being the media’s failings is really just the readership not knowing how to read it.

At Thanksgiving dinner the other day, a family friend – who I truly cannot stand in the first place – brought the usual holiday drama to the table when he brought up an op-ed piece that he read in The Wall Street Journal. Now I’m a fan of WSJ, so when he started going on about this and that and global-warming-is-a-myth, it took all my energy not to throw my spiced yams at him across the table.

The problem wasn’t the source, the problem wasn’t the media nor the author nor the publication. It was him. He read an op-ed as an article; he read an op-ed as truth.

In my newsroom, we fact-check opinion pieces just as scrupulously as news articles. (In fact, we’ve caught a couple plagiarisms because of this.) But time after time, critics and skeptics of the paper will point to our viewpoints page as being representative of our biases.

There isn’t more to do than to label the page “VIEWPOINTS,” the same page every issue. I cannot watermark the page with “THIS IS NOT NEWS. THIS IS SOMEONE’S OPINION. YOU ARE ENTITLED TO YOUR OWN, BUT THIS IS NOT AN ARTICLE TO USE TO BOLSTER YOUR POSITION.”

It’s just not our fault that they do not understand.