Although I really like the ultra high quality scans of each squelch issue that is up on The Heuristic Squelch’s website, I do miss being able to individually link to particular articles.
I highly recommend reading page 3 of the most recent issue as it relates very strongly to one of my previous rantings.
For some inexplicable reason, I’ve been getting the urge to post about the Daily Cal. I’ve been fighting the urge mainly because I’d hate to give any attention to that paper at all if I could avoid it.
Let me make a few things clear. I actually honestly hate very few things. I can count the number of people I currently hate on one finger, and most of the things I bitch and complain about have more to do with the fact that I romanticize being a bitter, grumpy old man. I hate the Daily Cal. Hate. Hate beyond words or actions or anything else I can actually do with my body and mind other than seethe. I’ve hated individual columns and columnists, but mostly I hate the whole fucking paper and the fact that it exists at all. The sad thing is, because they don’t actually sell papers, I have no way to have any impact on their existence other than pretending they don’t exist at all.
Naturally, seeing Miguel’s advertisement of The Daily Clog, the only thing I could think was “Dear God, No. Why?” But, as I can’t help but look at a gruesome auto accident, I gave in and peeked at what they had to offer. And I saw this. A half page blurb, written in typical Go-Bears fashion, mocking The Stanford Daily for printing an article with inaccuracies, printing a retraction, and then firing the managing news editor, who happened to be the source of the misinformation (a response by Daily’s Public Editor can be found here).
I will say this as calmly as I can: People in glass houses should not throw stones.
Usually when people hear me expressing my frustrations with the Daily Cal, they don’t understand why I would expend so much energy on them. “I mean, they’re a bad paper but they’re harmless.” I wish that were the case. I’m willing to live with the fact that the paper is miserably written, entirely uninteresting, and probably the worst student paper in the Pac-10. But the danger of the Daily Cal is that though most people I know agree with the fact that they frequently print inaccuracies and misquotes, everyone underestimates their influence. Let’s keep in mind that the entire DeCal system was entirely restructured into a much more restrictive system, and that the Male Sexuality DeCal was completely destroyed based on blatant, flagrant lies that were printed in the Daily Cal. DeCal’s are what they are now because someone decided to lie about connections between someone’s harmful behavior and the Male Sexuality course. This isn’t small stuff, folks. It got national media attention.
It gets particularly personal with every story they print about the USCA, an organization I hold very close to my heart. I happen to live in a very clean, very functional, very safe, and very loving Student Housing Cooperative off of Durant and Piedmont. I am very confident that most of the members of the USCA would describe their living situations very similarly despite their reservations about the way the organization is run, whether they live at Wolf, Rochdale, Kingman, or that most frequent media punching bag, The Cloyne Court Hotel and Casino. The fact of the matter is that I often have to convince friends and potential co-opers that we are not havens for smack addicts, rampant drug use, filth, disease, vermin, and all-around destruction. At least not any more than any other housing operation at our scale. I’ve had friends who have refused invitations to dinner at Wolf because they were afraid of the food. That really hurts. That’s my house, and those are my homies. And this all comes from the lies, rumors, and misquotes that were either read directly out of the Daily Cal, or because of circulation of that bad information.
So I must admit, to see a Daily Cal staff writer (as the Clog purports in its logo) go out of their way to bash the Stanford Daily for retracting an ill informed news article and then act to save their credibility by firing those on its staff responsible for the misinformation, thoroughly sickens me. The Daily is actually a decent paper in my experience. The Daily has taken measures that most major papers would take in such an event, despite the lack of any pressing need to do so. They seem to pride themselves on their journalistic integrity. It is behavior that should be applauded. The unnamed Daily Cal staff writer clearly disagrees:
It would be easy to castigate the Stanford Daily for shitting on journalistic standards, but we’re inclined to cut them a little slack. Clearly, the Daily’s staff remains too traumatized from their Ink Bowl loss to properly run a student newsletter, let alone scrutinize a self-aggrandizing news story.
Journalistic standards my ass. Any decent paper would have gone bankrupt from libel suits for the shit the Daily Cal has pulled. It’s a miracle of pure apathy that it even has a space on the web to throw those kinds of stones.
Please, for my sanity, my genetically disadvantaged blood pressure, and all our sakes, do not read the Daily Cal. Do not fucking pick up the Daily Cal. Let them sit there and rot in their distribution shelves and maybe with time and luck they will fade out of existence.
