Re: The Optimist, Nov. 5. “Four more years” by Jaci Schneider, opinion editor

I enjoyed my time working on the Optimist staff. I spent two years as a paid staff writer and wrote plenty of news stories and opinion pieces. I never grew tired of defending the Optimist to its detractors on campus. Whenever someone would complain about the paper’s lack of quality or biased nature, I demanded evidence. Show me the offensive news, I’d say to them, point out to me the yellow journalism, and I’ll personally apologize and do what I can to fix the problem. No one ever came up with anything. And when the Optimist was judged to be the best college paper in the state last year, beating out heavyweights like UT and Texas A&M, I was even more pleased of the way I’d spent so many hours working on the paper.

So you can imagine how disappointed I was to read Jaci Schneider’s story about President Bush’s re-election. Her sampling of sources seemed arbitrary at best and downright lazy at worst. It reads like Schneider forgot to ask her only faculty source for explanation about the nation’s divided nature, and Schneider’s student sources offered such penetrating observations as preferring one party to control the Presidency and Congress so there isn’t “so much political stuff to go through.” Helpful.

Could no student or faculty member be reached to voice a moderate or even, dare I dream, Democratic opinion? I’m sure a member of ACU’s political minority would have been happy to speak out, and such journalistic bipartisanship could have done wonders for the Optimist’s credibility.

Although I also disagreed with that day’s editorial, at least I knew it to be protected by the disclaimer that the editorial is an opinion piece, reflective of most of the staff. But to see such sadly biased writing on the front page was disappointing. I guess all those critics were on to something.

Daniel Carlson
Class of 2004