Yes, politics and music do mix, just ask post-Fables of the Reconstruction R.E.M. or the last few decades of punk rock. I’d just rather not mix them here.
Regardless, I am one among many covering the election for my school. My byline might appear more than once and there’s a chance something nice will be under it. My colleagues are also, for the most part, brilliant, give or take a few deathly competitive misanthropes (journalism apparently attracts them, who knew?). I suggest you read/watch their stuff as well.
THE OUTCOME:
I wrote two stories of varying length and quality. The first concerned what to expect from our team of journalists which is as throwaway as it sounds.
The second I am much more proud of. It’s about UNR students studying abroad in Chile not receiving their absentee ballots.
It’s written as straight deadline news, so there’s little of my usual print caterwauling. But I felt extremely satisfied after writing it, a feeling all too rare lately.
Also, to spotlight one of my peers, Jessica Pacheco wrote an inspired report on what I had originally wished to cover — the Republican reaction.
Her story is one of the few to receive negative commentary.
While you spent a lot of time interviewing my son last night, I guess his open honest comments were too much for you to print. Nice to see censorship in the media at work even by our young people.
Apparently this Republican mom, Lianne, bristled at our ability as reporters to not include every inane comment or commentator when disseminating news.
Let it be said, and may it ring out through the hollow darknesses of America’s festering hatred of media: Self-editing isn’t censorship.
Whatever your son said either already came across in the words of others or wasn’t newsworthy.
And while I lament often the implications of “expertise” in modern society, for more often than not the experts know nothing, both Miss Pacheco and myself have spent the last three years dragging ourselves through ragged journalistic streets, built on the backs of ordinary lives, both saved and ruined by our trespasses; the waters of ethical trauma flooding endless through the metal grating; all of us at the beck and call of so many pushes, so many pulls, like there are rabid dogs tearing our intellectual limbs in opposite directions.
We make no decision lightly.
Well said, Brad.
LOLZ @ “Write for Sustainable Capitalism,” and “Ordinary People Do Fucked-Up Shit When Fucked-Up Shit Becomes Ordinary.”
I’ve never met ANYONE who liked Propagandhi as much (or even close to as much as me).
“In which god’s name will we be killed? Who’s most righteous? Who’s most terrified?”