I shouldn't even be blogging at the moment. I've practically squandered my evening as is. However, as long as I'm being unproductive, I thought I'd take a moment to vent about a decidedly bad turn of events.
As you know if you've been reading, I've found more than a few bones to pick with the Daily Northwestern. They were gracious enough to print my first editorial letter, but the second was rejected. The reason, they claimed, was that they only printed one per student per quarter. Whether intentional or not, there is no way of finding out about this until they send in one too many letters. I have my suspicions about a desire to avoid criticism, but we'll hold off on that for a lack of evidence. I can always post my thoughts as comments on their editorial articles online.
Last week, however, the Daily added a new policy for online feedback. Since they are having trouble managing such "high volumes of posts," they are now instituting a "one-week limit" for postings to articles.
What does that even mean? You can only post on an article for one week? You can only post on an article after one week?
Since they moderate comments before allowing them to appear on the website, I can only assume that they must receive hundreds that don't make it to the web. I mean, I generally see fewer than ten comments per day (and most days less than five), so that would be the only explanation to make sense.
That is, unless, they are actually quite disinterested in receiving critical feedback from their readers, so they're limiting the amount of feedback they'll actually receive.
This is, in my opinion, part of the larger problem of the media insulating itself from the people it purports to be informing. Why should we be so interested in hearing what they have to say when they have no interest in hearing what we have to say?
Hmph. Thank God for the internet, the last bastion of unadulterated free speech left in this world. Well, that is unless the UN and so many of its member states get their grubby hands on it.
4 comments:
I'll thank the people that actually created the internet, rather than a mythological being.
attn: The UN eats babies!
Their refusal to print your letter is obviously part of some larger Jewboy plot.
"...I thought I'd take a moment to vent about a decidedly bad turn of events."
Your campus paper rejecting your letter is a "decidedly bad turn of events"? I though something significantly bad must have happened until I got to the actual point of your post! You must think very highly of your own opinion; I'd have to call that excessive pride of the most "sinful" sort. Maybe, just maybe, you're that GUY whose letters are met with rolled eyes and snorts of derisive laughter as they read them out loud and the one-letter-a-quarter policy is in place because they've had to deal with self-important fanatics who think their god is speaking THROUGH THEM in the past. They probably know you by a cute nick-name and pin a copy of your letter to the office bulletin board with your favorite juicy bits of indignation highlighted and they scribble insulting comments in the margin.
Watch your hyperbole. Very few scenarios involving a mere letter to the editor should be described as a "decidedly bad turn of events."
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