On Feb. 12, junior Alice Tomic wrote an letter to the editor taking the Tufts Daily to task for what she saw as overly sympathetic bias in coverage of street artist Shephard Fairey, whose mural now adorns the wall outside of Jumbo Express. What caught my eye in the piece was a sentence decrying a "lack of professional journalism when it comes to Barack Obama" on campus.
The phrase was something of a non-sequitur, coming early in the piece and lacking any sort of substantiation. Still, Tomic's assertion about a sort of liberal adulation of Obama in campus media — what she described in an e-mail to me as a "warm fuzzy glow of excitement surrounding his presidency" — deserves to be examined.
Certainly, the excitement surrounding Obama's election is palpable, especially on a campus whose student population, and likely whose faculty, skews towards the left. Anyone who was on the Hill amidst the surging throngs of ebullient students the night that Obama was elected can testify to that.
The question, then, is the extent to which this feeling has seeped into campus coverage of the Obama presidency. For this analysis I will consider the Tufts Daily and the Tufts Observer, both of which seek to be objective news outlets.
The actions of the federal government usually fall outside the purview of Tufts media. For the Daily, news coverage has therefore been largely limited to the inauguration and the election.
The Daily seems to have remained objective in this regard. The Nov. 5 edition restricted itself to the returns and voter reactions. Rob Silverblatt's coverage of Obama's inauguration address was well-written but seemed a little lacking in sources who found the speech somewhat mediocre; mostly, his quotes are pretty positive. This may simply reflect the reality of the situation, as the student body would seem predisposed to approve of a speech that criticized the Bush administration, urged a reformulated foreign policy and promised a renewed emphasis on civil liberties.
The Observer has a little more flexibility because of its weekly format, which necessarily shifts its content from hard news to wider-ranging features. The Observer is freed from the obligation to report foremost on timely news pertaining to Tufts, a constraint that governs how the Daily allocates its limited page space. The Observer is able to stray farther from Medford without worrying about the Tufts-centric events it has failed to mention. This can be problematic if it dislocates a specific target of coverage — what is known as the "news peg" — something that can dilute the article's focus and open up avenues for the writer to slant his or her angle.
The Observer seems to have avoided this pitfall, offering analysis instead of opinion. For example, the Dec. 8 piece, "What Comes After W?" coolly dissects how Obama will move forward with Middle East policy without praising or criticizing, noting that "[n]o amount of campaign promises will relieve the incoming administration of the current environment overseas." The feature "The Path to A Vote," examining the factors precipitating three students casting their ballots, does a good job of balancing arguments for who would do the best job of leading America.
The Observer's editorial board has a policy of not endorsing candidates for president, and its Nov. 3 editorial continued this tradition, closing with the ambivalent phrase, "Will either man be able to make good on his promise come January? We'll see." A Nov. 3 opinion piece is similarly noncommittal, closing with the lines, "If McCain is elected, we are f---ed. If Obama's our Messiah, call me an atheist." Hardly a starry-eyed endorsement of either candidate.
The Daily has the greatest opportunity to analyze the fledgling administration within the confines of its editorial page. Although a search through the editorial archives confirms a generally supportive tone for Obama, the objective of an editorial page is to espouse a specific opinion. If the editorial staff of the Daily is consistent in approving of Obama's decisions, this is within their rights and affirms the function of an editorial page to take a stance. In this case, I imagine their stance resonates with the beliefs of the majority of their readership.
I also notice often that the pieces eschew any sort of myopic dogmatism. For example, a Jan. 22 editorial entitled "Millions worldwide hang hopes on Obama" tempers excitement with sober assessments such as: "Everyone, American or not, needs to understand that President Obama will do what he can, but he may not be able to do everything." Similarly, an editorial congratulating the president for his decision to issue an executive order closing Guantanamo Bay assesses what other measures Obama needs to undertake, rather than gloating or falling back on empty triumphalism.
Overall, it seems that both publications have done a good job of remaining fair and impartial. If editorials tend to approve of Obama's decisions, however circumspectly, this should come as no surprise. I'm not saying that either publication has done a perfect job, because invariably personal assumptions and preferences manifest themselves in subtle ways such as page layout and the wording of headlines. But generally speaking, Obama-related news coverage in the Observer and the Daily has been balanced, informative and pertinent to Tufts.
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Jeremy White is a senior majoring in English. He is the university's public editor. His columns are available online at http://ase.tufts.edu/publiceditor and he can be reached at jeremybw1@gmail.com.
