The Cavalier Daily put a lot of time and resources into covering the recent Virginia elections. For the most part I think they did a good job. Articles covering candidate platforms, financial and donation information and opinion pieces from students on the candidates for governor offered good depth and breadth of information. As one online commenter noted on the Terry McAuliffe platform summary, it is difficult to choose categories on which to compare candidates. I agree with the commenter that more information about candidate stances on important but excluded issues like same-sex marriage and K-12 education would have strengthened the articles.
The Cavalier Daily is to be commended also for not excluding Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis from their research and writing. He was a significant factor in the race and deserved the same level of analysis as the other candidates. That said, I was perplexed by the comparatively small amount of information on the attorney general race. The candidates for attorney general were excluded from the platform descriptions and only total donation information and a chart about in state versus out of state donations were included in “Follow the Money” in the Nov. 4 print edition. This is one of three statewide offices and an office that can have direct effects on Cavalier Daily readers. The race deserved more coverage than it was given.
While much of the election coverage was good, other parts left me troubled. I’ve written before about multimedia content on The Cavalier Daily website, particularly the videos. I engaged in email conversation with one reader about whether some videos betrayed a bias on the part of The Cavalier Daily. I felt they didn’t. That was based in part on an idea I wrote about on Oct. 6 that very often, especially in a college newspaper, events are covered rather than issues. I wrote that including opposing beliefs or viewpoints in every story is unnecessary and may even compromise the story.
Elections, though, are different. The Cavalier Daily produced and published online, on Nov. 4 — the day before the election — a video of former President Bill Clinton and now Governor-elect McAuliffe speaking at a campaign event in downtown Charlottesville on Oct. 30. The video consisted entirely of short clips of Clinton and McAuliffe giving their stump speeches. There were no interviews with people who came to the event, and there was no analysis and there was no other attempt to place the event in any context.
There are at least two things that give me pause about this video. First, while not every story or event has opposing views that should be included or at least given equal time, elections are not like other stories or events. In this case there were at least two other perspectives that should have been given similar treatment; campaign stops by Ken Cuccinelli and Robert Sarvis, both of whom had events in Charlottesville in the last week of the campaign. Leaving out the other two candidates flies in the face of giving equal time to candidates in elections, which most news outlets try to do, and for good reason. Giving one candidate what amounts to a two-minute free advertisement just doesn’t work especially when there was no particular reason that the video needed to be made and didn’t need to be posted prior to the election.
The second thing that bothers me is that it is posted in the “Multimedia” section of the website. In thinking about these videos, especially those that cut across news topics, I realized that I’m unsure how to assess them. News stories are labeled as such and Opinion pieces, while at times confusingly named, are also so identified. Readers can disagree with opinion pieces but bias is an irrelevant consideration in those instances; they’re opinions. News stories whether written or in other forms are judged on different criteria. When videos like this are posted under a different heading, readers are left with no way to determine how they should judge the content. News pieces, regardless of format, should be labeled as such and The Cavalier Daily should err on the side of presuming that a more distanced, aloof stance should prevail when reporting stories like this one.
Christopher Broom is The Cavalier Daily’s public editor. He can be reached at publiceditor@cavalierdaily.com or on Twitter @CDPublicEditor.
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