Part of a reporter's job is to give readers, in addition to the facts, a sense of the conditions in which those facts exist. For example, if \nPolitics Prof. Larry Sabato, director of the University's Center for Politics, had given last week's talk about the 2012 presidential election to an empty hall, that would have been part of the news. But Sabato wasn't alone. According to The Cavalier Daily's report ("Sabato talks election," April 11), "[a]bout 500 members of the University community attended the event."
Deeper in the story, Associate Editor Viet VoPham quoted third-year College student Abigail Stroup's impression of the crowd.
"I was a little disappointed in the underrepresentation of students, [since] students of any major would benefit from hearing this presentation, not just those in the politics department," Stroup said, according to VoPham's article.
There's no indication that Stroup has any particular expertise in crowd estimating or how she determined who among that crowd were students.
There's no explanation of what "underrepresentation" means in this context. How many of the roughly 500 members of the University community at Sabato's talk were students? It's not clear, but some people certainly thought students weren't underrepresented at all. The article generated three letters to the editor in a single day. One was devoted to praising Sabato and promoting the Crystal Ball newsletter, but two were about the number of students in the audience.
One reader wrote that there was a reason more students weren't at the 6:30 p.m. event ("The earlybirds," April 12).
"[M]any of my friends arrived before 6:30 and could not find a seat," according to the letter writer. "Some who arrived a few minutes late were not allowed to enter, and declined the option of sitting in the viewing room. I don't think this necessarily indicates a lack of interest by University students. Many probably did not anticipate this to be a community-wide event, and therefore did not plan accordingly."
Another ("Down in front," April 12, 2012) declared there was no shortage of students.
"[T]here were many students there," this letter said. "I sat in the front and was surrounded by fellow students. Yes, there were many people from the community there also, but to say there was a low student turn-out is false. Ms. Stroup seems to have sat toward the back where no students were visible."
So, were students underrepresented? Were plenty of students there, way down front? And why is anyone talking about that anyway? It really has nothing to do with the point of the article or Sabato's talk and, even if it did, why is Abigail Stroup the person to ask about it?
It's a case of too much information - and misdirected information at that.
The same article had a problem with too little information. Former Sen. Rick Santorum had become a former presidential candidate shortly before the talk. According to the article, Sabato said of Santorum, "He had no chance of being the nominee. He was simply hurting Romney. It's difficult to run if you lose your home state twice - once for Senate, once for president." As one online commenter wrote: "When was it that Santorum lost a Pennsylvania election for president?"
The answer is never, as another online commenter explained, "That quote is misleading - he led up to that by saying that internal polls showed Santorum essentially 3 points behind Romney in the PA primary. He was saying that, by suspending his campaign, he leaves the door open to a future run. Otherwise, if he ran and lost PA, after having lost by 17 points in his 2006 Senate reelection, he would have had a murky political future."
That's pretty much it. Santorum had a good chance of losing Pennsylvania, the state he was born in, the state he represented in the Senate until he got shellacked in 2006.
Santorum didn't move back to Pennsylvania when his Senate career ended. Like so many former holders of elected federal office, he settled near the District of Columbia so he could cash in on his connections and insider experience. His current home state is Virginia, where he failed to get on the ballot, so he had a chance to lose two home states in one primary season. Anyone following the presidential primaries fairly closely would know this and fill in the blanks left by the writer who covered the event and the editors who reviewed the article before it was published. But that violates an old adage of good journalism: Never underestimate readers' intelligence or overestimate their knowledge.
Some of the space spent on speculation about students' enthusiasm for Sabato's talk about the election would have been better spent giving some context to the professor's Santorum quote.
Tim Thornton is the ombudsman for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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