That Wasn’t News
As I am no longer an editor for The Concordian, and therefore do not represent the newspaper or its views, I feel as though I can finally express certain issues I’ve had with The Link’s reporting this year.
The Link is a valuable news source for students. I have the utmost respect for most of your masthead, especially [former The Link news editor] Christopher Curtis, who has been nothing but courteous to me all year.
That being said, I believe in these past few weeks The Link has tried to pass things off as news that actually lacked an informational basis, focusing instead on the opinions of your editorial team. Nothing illustrates this more than your elections report card, an article that appeared in the news section and used a completely fabricated rating system to indicate your own perception of the campaigning. Rather than simply informing students about the campaign, I felt as though The Link did its best to lead readers in one voting direction with content that often belonged in the opinions section.
Also, I was sort of mystified by the paper’s recent decision to drag in perceived conflicts of interest at The Concordian as a method of taking the heat off yourselves. The article “On Biases and Conflicts of Interest,” which was by no means a news article, did a valid job of defending the paper’s journalistic integrity and value, and listed the measures you had taken to try and avoid conflicts. And yet you still felt the need to slag your competition (falsely in one case, since [former The Concordian Editor-in-Chief] Sarah Deshaies never wrote about ASFA while a councillor) when we had no part in calling into question your paper’s integrity. Were you mad about us reporting on the protest of The Link? Because Curtis himself said that if someone was protesting The Concordian, The Link would have done the same thing.
Despite the fact that, for example, we knew of the potential conflict of interest that existed due to the relationship between CSU councillor Lex Gill and Justin Giovannetti for many months, even while Giovannetti quoted Gill as a source of information once in an article, The Concordian has never published something in print exposing The Link’s ‘dirty laundry.’
I hope next year The Link chooses to report news as news, and opinions as opinions, and that The Concordian’s name remains largely absent from your pages.
—Evan LePage,
Former news editor, The Concordian
This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 29, published April 5, 2011.
