PFC Strikes Again!
This time, the target is none other than the UO’s daily paper, the Oregon Daily Emerald. Leading this renewed charge against the free exchange of ideas? Our old friend Mason Quiroz of course.
In a drawn-out debate that lasted more than an hour, PFC member Mason Quiroz made a motion to de-fund the Emerald completely.
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This renewed attack on the very idea of academic expression demonstrates not only that Quiroz lacks any understanding of viewpoint neutrality, but also is willing to undermine the principles of the academy in pursuit of his short-sighted goals.
Quiroz goes on to state the following which, if you’ve been following the Commentator’s on-going battle with these same forces of darkness, is so obviously untrue as to be laughable:
“I think the students deserve more than one paper, and I think the students shouldn’t have to pay $111,000 for a paper that isn’t read,” Quiroz added. “It is the responsibility of the PFC to the students.”
Attempting to silence the two most widely-read publications on campus by slashing their funding puts the lie to that now, doesn’t it? The OC and the ODE are easily the two most popular rags on the UO campus and to take a swipe at both of them within weeks of each other is sickening.
Granted, the ODE is only dependent upon the incidental fee for about 10% of its budget, and would probably be able to totter along all right sans that $100,000 or so, but losing that source of revenue would undoubtedly damage their ability to print, publish, and distribute. What’s more, even continuing to publish, lacking that $100,000 will damage the overall production value of the paper.
I’ll be the first to admit that I give the ODE a lot of crap, especially about their columnists and headlines. However, I recognize that putting out a daily paper is hard work, especially while trying to go to school full time (which you must do to be employed at the Emerald), and the value of a campus daily like the ODE is more tha worth the cost.
Not mention in the article linked above, however, is that the PFC debated a “lack of minority viewpoints” in the pages of the pages of the Emerald. On this I couldn’t agree more, but I think the PFC and I are operating on two very different definitions of minority.
To those PSST members of PFC and ASUO Senate, minority is only skin deep. Their complaint is that the Emerald staff does not have an appropriately diverse number of phenotypes. My complaint is that the ODE editorial staff lacks sufficiently many viewpoints. Granted, it is the Opinion section, but a paper that claims to be a paper of record should endevor to have as diverese a selection of commentaries as possible. Of course there are space constraints, et cetera, but I don’t think it’d be that difficult to find a few different folks with a few different ideas. Maybe all of them are working for us, but I doubt it. Also, before any of y’all get all twitterpated about the OC’s lack of ideological diversity, the Commentator has never made any claim about being a journal of record. We are a journal of opinion, and thusly shall remain.
Before I move on, I will commend the ODE for running a surprisingly wide range of guest commentaries and letters. I remember the Kleckner/Blanchard/Clifford days when only letters the editorial staff enjoyed were printed. So kudos to them on that, I still think the columnists could use a little bit of work, though.
The point of all of this, really, is that the PFC is continuing its poorly thought-out and highly illegal persecution of campus publications for their content. Have the Oregon Voice and Student Insurgent been subjected to this kind of thing? Is Quiroz after the ODE because of their support for the Commentator? With the PFC’s complete lack of justification for their behavior, and their inability to understand very simple rules, we’ll likely never know the answer. However, it is certain that if these matters end up being decided by the courts, history will not look favorably on the PFC.
