Hypocritical Editorial
Reading last week’s editorial piece on this year’s Clubs Fair, “Selling Our Souls” [Vol. 31 Iss. 5, Pg. 35], I couldn’t help but notice that this self-righteous piece showed zero self-awareness.
The author of the editorial has no qualms in bashing the CSU for trying to bring in new advertising revenue at the expense of selling the soul of the Clubs Fair event to corporations who bring nothing but suffering and misery onto students’ pancreases and wallets. The author goes so far to ask “Aren’t students generally unhealthy and indebted enough?”
Flipping immediately to the next page of The Link, advertisements for Bar Biftek and the admittedly delicious Le Gourmet Burger, are all taking up some advertising space. Last time I checked, burgers, pitchers and shooters cost students health and money. The Link surely receives advertising revenue from these companies to support itself beyond the student subsidies it already receives, as any newspaper would do.
What is troubling here is not that The Link is bashing the CSU for bringing corporate sponsors that promote unhealthy student lifestyles to a Clubs Fair event. In itself that might be a tenable argument. What complicates this position is that The Link itself accepts advertisement revenue they bring in from comparable businesses to stay afloat. It’d be ridiculous to bash a newspaper for needing advertising revenue to stay financially viable, but to accept sponsors who promote the same kind of activities demonized in an editorial as toxic to student’s lifestyles is intellectually dishonest, especially considering another advertisement found The Link.
What I’m referring to is the full-page color advertisement promoting a The Link event called “Drink with The Link.” Was it really necessary to have a full page colour advertisement promoting an event that would both help in tightening students’ wallets and damaging their livers? Would the advertisements for the bars and restaurants that shill out unhealthy products still be necessary for the financial stability of The Link if it weren’t printing full page color advertisements for its own events? Maybe so, but the ad’s prominence makes The Link look hypocritical.
I won’t be so melodramatic as to claim that The Link has sold its soul. But shouldn’t The Link remain logically consistent with its editorial position and stop taking these advertisements for unhealthy products that, as stated in the editorial, only profit “the corporations themselves?”
—Robert Neszt,
B.A. English Literature
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