Many of us may have grown up constantly being warned to watch out for misinformation online, and being told which sources we could trust versus which ones we could not — “Wikipedia is not reliable” is burned into our brains from our lower school teachers. But the landscape of available sources has changed dramatically in our lifetimes, and there are serious challenges today with trusting information.
The pandemic coincided with when I began to embark on the adventure of figuring out the answer to the question, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” In that moment, nothing frustrated me more during the pandemic than watching how quickly misinformation spread. Trust eroded in our major institutions with severe and persisting consequences. That frustration left an impression on me, but I didn’t quite know how just yet.
I arrived at U.Va. knowing I wanted to do something to get involved, and it just so happened that by the time I locked in, The Cavalier Daily was the only application that had not closed. I began filling it out, and I indicated that I wanted to join the Opinion desk.
“That will be easy, I have lots of opinions,” I told myself. “News is boring anyway, plenty of people report that.”
After a year on the Opinion desk, I found myself hitting a wall. I did not have as many opinions as I thought. And realizing how many other people had opinions which they proudly shared online, I decided they probably did not need to hear mine. For a reason I can only describe as a gut feeling — likely the result of the aforementioned frustration with media literacy and trust — I decided to internally transfer to the News desk.
Now, of course, I can’t imagine it any other way. From the moment I started, I sought to correct people’s preconceived notions about The Cavalier Daily. The University community is full of a diverse set of interests — students, professors, workers, Charlottesville residents and more — and covering those interests was a great challenge. For starters, people tended to take our work less seriously because it was a student newspaper. And at a time when trust in the media has reached an all time low, The Cavalier Daily was not always exempt from that.
That all changed in June 2025.
The resignation of our university president was not just a local issue — it was a national one. With a massive spotlight on U.Va., The Cavalier Daily mobilized despite most of us in full-time internships as many as 13 time zones away from Charlottesville. We beat national outlets to stories, and beat stories to death. We looked in every corner and behind every door to ensure the community received the full story. We did it all while pushing for objectivity in the strongest degree. When Democrats were up in arms about what had transpired, we made sure to hear from Republicans too.
I observed a gradual — but noticeable — shift. The University community began to trust us, to realize what we could do with few resources and less experience. But it went beyond that as well. Hearing from friends and family far away, from colleagues in journalism in other markets, that they were reading our work reaffirmed my commitment to The Cavalier Daily. Hearing people shout “McCracken News” at me on the Corner — my Instagram handle — instead of just calling me Ford, always made me smile. I don’t think any of us look back on that experience feeling anything other than proud of the work the paper accomplished.
I owe so much to The Cavalier Daily as an organization. Through the paper, I was able to discover my passion, to get good at it and to use it to work for the community. That passion undoubtedly propelled me to my next venture, covering politics in Washington.
I moved into video reporting, something I thoroughly enjoy because of the connection it gives me to the readers. It may be easy to doubt something you read on the internet, but watching a person tell you something feels more personal, I have always thought.
Thank you to the community for trusting us, for supporting our work and for funding it with advertisements and generous donations. Thank you to the news team for pushing me harder than I thought possible — I think we made each other better every day we did the job. I went from passively believing in objectivity to endlessly pursuing it as a reality. I learned to set my beliefs aside and critically examine my own reporting to ensure I was telling a story that anyone could say was fair. I did not always succeed, but I never stopped trying.
When people talk about lacking trust in the media, they often throw out the accusation that it is overly biased. Journalists have bias. It is unavoidable and undeniable. But journalism is, in my mind, the best remaining public forum. If Democrats and Republicans won’t be friends, won’t debate ideas, won’t date each other, don’t like each other, don’t trust each other and don’t even have the same facts, then we need a solution.
I believe that journalism is that solution. Having worked in newsrooms with tens and with thousands, I can attest that by-and-large, journalists believe in the mission of objectively and factually informing the public. The more people reward actors who seek to shout the loudest with the wildest take, the more we have to lose as a society.
I can’t promise you that journalists will get it right 100 percent of the time. But none of us would be doing the job if we weren’t going to try as hard as we could. To the community — thank you for letting us try.
Ford McCracken was a news editor for the 136th term, a senior associate and senior news writer for the 135th term, and a news writer and opinion senior associate for the 134th term.
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