Let me start by saying something nice. Denise Taylor’s column about the media (“Let me hear both sides,” Sept. 25) was a nice piece of work. It took an easy target — “a survey conducted by Gallup found that 60 percent of Americans have little or no trust in the media’s capacity to report news accurately, fairly and objectively” — but didn’t take the easy, thoughtless route. She talked about the changes in the news business since Uncle Walter told us the way it was, but Taylor may have given an older generation too much credit when she wrote, “Americans are a lot less willing to hear the truth than they were 40 years ago.”
In the middle part of the 20th century, there were only three major television networks and only three major nightly news broadcasts. But every city of any size had more than one newspaper and those papers were tailored to different audiences, so an American wasn’t completely awash in objective journalism. Even so, it’s hard not to agree that the situation is much worse today. “Today,” Taylor wrote, “we choose our news, so we choose how to define what is fact.” Maybe it’s because we know how malleable “facts” can be that we’re in a situation wherein, “it’s not that we don’t watch the news, or even that we don’t like the news. We just don’t trust it.”
A news story (“Kaine campaign stumbles,” Sept. 25) avoided mistakes that appeared in previous stories involving politics and polls. It mentioned margins of error and included an attempt to explain the position of a candidate who did not respond to requests for comments. Another story about politics (“Political groups feel heat,” Sept. 27) didn’t do as well. The news hook seemed to be State Sen. Mark Herring’s visit to Grounds. Herring, D-Loudoun, attended the University and has announced he has plans to run for attorney general next year. Readers don’t learn that until the last paragraph. Between the first and second mention of Herring, readers get a lot of information about the University Democrats and College Republicans. Or maybe it was spin. And sometimes questions were left hanging. For instance, right after the Democratic spokesman said his organization “registered nearly a thousand UVA students,” the story told readers, “The University’s two prime partisan groups, however, disagree about how best to engage students politically.” But it didn’t explain how they disagreed. Maybe it was a problem of too little space. Maybe it was too little focus. But it’s certain there wasn’t enough information in there.
Another story (“Study: Football players’ graduation rates lag,” Sept. 26) was a really good idea. But the execution wasn’t all it could be.
It began: “Football players on average graduate at lower rates than non-student-athletes despite opposing claims by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.” That seems to compare football players’ graduation rates to non-students’ graduation rates, but that’s not really the problem. That lead seems to say the NCAA is lying. If that’s the argument, the evidence needs to be presented much more clearly. And someone who isn’t connected to the studies needs to talk about their differences. It seems they all have some problems. The Graduation Success Rate and the federal government rate, the story seems to say, include part-time students in their graduation rate calculations. That seems to build in a serious inaccuracy. The Adjusted Graduation Gap, according to the story, fixes that, but doesn’t account for students who leave one school and graduate from another. Those people graduated, but they don’t count as graduates. The UNC Chapel Hill professor behind the report says the time football players spend conditioning, practicing and playing makes them different from other students, and it may account for the differences in graduation rates. But readers don’t learn how much time players spend on football. It might be interesting to compare football players to basketball players or soccer players or baseball players, both through their graduation rates and the time they spend on their sports.
The story begins talking about football players, but also talks about student-athletes — a group that would include lots of people who don’t play football.
The statistics seem a little muddled, but that’s not entirely the writers’ fault. The stats really are muddled. A more useful measurement would compare student-athletes to full-time students and account for students, athletes or not, who begin at one institution and graduate from another. It would also break down student-athletes according to sport. And it would make a distinction between student-athletes who drop out to begin professional sports careers and athletes who simply drop out.
And when a University spokeswoman says, “Athletics’ mission is to graduate student-athletes, and the goal is 100 percent,” the next question should be something like, “What’s the closest athletics has gotten to that goal?”
Tim Thornton is the ombudsman for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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