I saw Ross Boomer's blog post, titled "A Quick Note to Our Haters (and Lovers)." Here are some quick thoughts. I suspect much of it is addressed to me, but this being the Forum, they have blacklisted me and don't even mention me by name anymore. (That's not just me saying that but several members of the Forum have written me telling me just that.)
1. Ross writes,
"Although the Forum shares the same name of what once was CMC’s official newspaper, we no longer consider ourselves a news source like The Independent, The Port Side, or The Student Life. Web 2.0 is how our generation communicates with the world, and this is the format we’ve subscribed to."That's nice, but the preponderance of The Forum's budget comes from student fees, which is an official source of funding. Indeed when The Forum still receives student fees, shouldn't it be accessible to all students and not just the ones that Ross thinks can write? That's sort of the school policy with other clubs. Why is the Forum exempt?
After all, some of the posts on the Forum don't reflect well at all on CMC. Ross himself writes, "we’re also a group of students who waste hours on facebook stalking classmates, who constantly think about sex during our government seminars, and who are very happy to see someone like Ludacris come to campus." Forgive us, but some of us actually enjoy listening to our government seminars, don't like Ludacris, and don't use facebook to stalk people. Oughtn't we be consulted on some of the more silly or downright disgusting things written on the Forum in our college's name?
Let's continue. Ross writers further, "With a mission to provide content that students enjoy, The Forum as a news blog and student portal has no political agenda and has never striven to solely provide dry news."
The idea of a non-partisan news blog would be nice. Unfortunately, The Forum has shown its unable to do that. With blog posts attacking Mormon students and those of us who opposed homosexual marriage, it's shown that it can't be fair, even when some students asked for equal time to write posts on why they support defining marriage as between one man and one woman. That Ross calls such content "inappropriate" testifies to his inability to be a fair and judicious editor.
Ross alludes to "Recent controversy surrounding our site's right to censor inapporpriate content is unfortunate." (Ross's probably refering to when he censored my comment about homosexual activists that have targeted pro-Proposition 8 people. This, by the way, is against the spirit of the Forum in the first place. ) But why's it "unfortunate"? Is it unfortunate that Ross -- and Ross alone -- gets to decide what content will be in our "community"? I think it is and I don't think I'm alone. I'd be more than willing to have a vote on who the next Forum editor-in-chief should be. After all, if it's a community, shouldn't the community get some say?
The Forum's supposed non-ideologicalness is of interest because many of The Forum's new writers have, and some still do, write for the Port Side, the school's left wing newspaper.
