Eine Kleine Nachmittag Media Criticism

The fact that I rarely read the newspaper is one of the reasons that I'm not the world's best journalist. According to my instructors, at least. But once in a great while I'll pick up the school's paper, the Minnesota Daily. In the interest of journalistic credibility, I should say up front that I did apply for a job at the Daily, but apparently didn't make it past the first interview stage. So there may be a bit of a slant against the paper.

But even if there is a slant on my part, the article I'm linking to (Gophers football player under investigation) is still a shoddy piece of work. It goes against several of the basic tennants of reporting I learned years ago in my first reporting classes.

James Nord, the author, assumes that the football player in question, Sam Maresh, is guilty of assaulting a student. No "Innocent until proven guilty" here, just a little color picture of Maresh so you can spot him in any classes you share with him. Nord even quotes the police saying that Maresh is a suspect and no charges had been filed. Nord admits that the "Specific details of the event are unknown," but still wrote the story.

This sort of work shouldn't have made it through the editing process. Yet it did. I suppose one could argue that the football team is included in the "publish any dirt you can on public figures" tennant of journalism, but are they? They didn't have that good a season, Maresh is a freshman linebacker and may not have even played this season, and there are several other sports teams that deserve coverage. But obviously, the fact that a few other football players have had trouble with the police lately overrules the practices of good journalism. Also, the fact that they labeled this an "Athletics" story, then played up the crime aspect is particularly galling to me.

If you allow me to put on my cynical hat (red and black-checkered "Fargo" hat), I suppose this is good practice for when Jimmy Nord goes on to his Journalism career. Dig up the worst thing you can find and splash it on the front page over the fold. It doesn't matter if its true or not. It doesn't matter if he's not actually guilty. All that matters is selling papers. Which is especially ironic given that the Daily is free every day. Sheesh.

This week's Khatru isn't up yet. Obviously. I went home last week, and even though I had precious little else to do, I still didn't get it edited. Mostly because I forgot to scan it before I left. Anyway, its about halfway done with the computer editing. I've got next week's drawn, and five or six more scripted.