We were gonna say that the Emerald was starting to do better. The Ol’ Dirty had seemingly radically cut down on the number of bullshit articles(fluff!) which is a curse for us at the OC. Without a constant stream of bad journalism who are we supposed to make fun of!?! But relax, the Emerald is still as dirty as ever which the recent plagiarism/fabrication scandal shows. Don’t get us wrong, the OC is far from perfect, our magazine seems to copy edited by a blind dyslexic after all and during our 30 years of existence surely one of our writers made something up or screwed up. Shit happens but the Emerald seems to have more shit than others.

But the real story in today’s issue was the cover article about ASUO president Sam Dotters-Katz and Professor Bill Harbaugh.  Apparently the Emerald show of its journalistic integrity by publishing wild and unfounded accusations. Without any evidence or basis the Emerald still decides to print words that frame Harbaugh as having vandalized both Dotters-Katz’s and Ehlen’s car . Shit, even Ehlen himself says that it is “farfetched” that Harbaugh would have vandalized Ehlen’s car. Dotters-Katz is also quoted as saying “I don’t know if Bill did it personally. I’m not necessarily making that accusation…Even the professors I’ve talked to who hate Bill say this isn’t his M.O. I agree, but that’s not to say he’s not involved indirectly.”

Why the hell would you ever even print such wild indirect accusations? There are no grounds for it unless you count the personal feelings of two people towards a third as conclusive evidence. Naturally, we don’t know what happened and who did what to the cars and that’s the problem. That the Emerald knowingly perpetrates a person as a criminal even though there is no evidence besides the hunch of two people who are feuding with Harbaugh. The car incident should even be mentioned as there is no evidence and anything other than evidence found by the police investigation is just useless navel-gazing. But as usual the Emerald actually has a nugget of something interesting in the article but fuck interesting and important things when you can publish rumors and private beefs! Roughly 90 % of the article is spent prying into the personal issues between Sam Dotters-Katz and Harbaugh  while only the last part is actually devoted to the real issue; the lack of transparency within the University and many of its operations.

If the University has nothing to hide and everything is completely kosher then why is so much hidden and blocked out from the public? This sentiment can of course be used to justify the NSA’s spying scandal but the difference is that what we’re dealing with here isn’t a private matter, this is a public university and we as students have the right to know where our money goes and how it is spent. Simple as that, or so you would think but instead the Emerald shys away from the issues and becomes a gossip magazine that spews out shit worse than a frat boy after 20 natty ice and a pizza.

We’re fucking psyched about this development, keep being dirty Emerald!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2014 at 13:18 by Martin Hallstrom and is filed under ASUO, Ethics, Miscellaneous, Ol' Dirty Emerald. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.