For me, the past year at The Eagle has been at turns fun, stressful, educational, and above all worthwhile. I became editorial page editor with the mandate to redesign the page, to get more and better contributors and to have regular columnists. I think I've succeeded in improving the page, and I hope that regular readers are happy with the difference between how the page looked in the beginning of the year and how it looks now.
I know that some future media critics and holier-than-thou politicos have pointed to my other job, secretary of the College Republicans, as a major conflict of interest that has transformed the page into an outpost for the ranting of right-wing crackpots. Other creative students attempted to draw a parallel between the "liberal media" on a national level and the "liberal" editorial page and its home, The Eagle.
So, in an effort to get rid of these feelings of oppression that some liberals and conservatives felt about the editorial page this year, I have decided to end my time as editor by describing the methodology that was used to publish editorials, list the amount of liberal, conservative and non-political editorials and publish an excerpt from one of the four (read it: four) editorials that were not published this year. Here it goes.
If a contributor sent a liberal piece, I published it. If a contributor sent a conservative piece, I published it. If in one week I received all liberal contributions, the editorial page was 100 percent liberal. If I received two conservative and two liberal contributions, the page was "balanced."
Out of the 117 editorials that were published between September and March, 45 were liberal, 36 were conservative and 36 were non-political. That translates to roughly 38 percent liberal, 30 percent conservative and 30 percent non-political. That's almost statistically insignificant, so eat your hearts out. If you think that the page was biased because one of those horrible, war-mongering republicans edited the page, think again. If you think the page was biased because of that awful liberal media, go back to the comfort of your Ann Coulter book.
Also, if you submitted and it wasn't published, I'm sorry. It wasn't published either because we already published extensive articles on the subject, your editorial was dated, you were exceptionally rude to me or you were this guy: "A lesson learned by some young women in the 1960s: virgin females shouldn't be arrested. The matron will take from you that which you should so willingly surrender to the man you love (and without any prior alcohol and drugs!)"
Opinion pieces and letters to the editor like the one above remind me of one of the funniest (and there are many) passages from Richard Russo's "Straight Man":
"I scan [the letters to the editor] ... for unusual content, which in the current climate is any subject other than the unholy trinity of insensitivity, sexism, and bigotry, which the self-righteous, though not always literate, letter writers want their readers to know they're against. As a group they seem to believe that high moral indignation offsets and indeed outweighs all deficiencies of punctuation, spelling, grammar, logic and style. In support of this notion there's only the entire culture."
Trust me, most of the letters were well thought out and well written. But every so often, we'd get one from a guy whose tin-foil hat wasn't working and thought The Eagle was the best place to voice his concern.
Anyway, in closing, if you're considering writing for the editorial page or you're interested in becoming the new editor, please contact The Eagle. It's a great job that pays well. You'll work with some of the finest people in the school, your editorial cartoonist may flip out and draw a cartoon about your inability to see beyond the editorial page, and you will also be invited to join the Sports and Editorial page sections' militia, whose seven-word motto has too many curses to be published in The Eagle.
As for me, you'll see me next year as Managing Editor for News, a position I'm very grateful to Anne Godlasky to have been chosen for. I'll be joining the position shared by such fine people as Evan Wagner and Keith F. Shovlin, and I hope that I'll be able to do as professional a job as they have.
On a closing note, please keep submitting to the editorial page. Your opinions really do matter, and in a school with such brilliant and inspiring scholars, it's great that the rest of us will get a sneak preview of what you'll be doing in our country and in our world once you get out of here. Thanks so much.
