Monday, August 08, 2005

Truth hurts when it's not pretty

There was an article in today's MN newspaper about Hispanic enrollment at the UA and the community college. Well, the reporter had some mistakes in the article and so I believe she'll get in trouble. She had a grammatical error, but that's insignificant when compared to misrepresenting facts or somebody's opinion. The reporter interviewed some students that are participating in a summer program at the university... they'll be college freshmen next fall and the majority of them will attend the community college with plans of transferring to a four-year institution in the future.

The point of the article was that the university administration needs to do a better job in recruiting Latinos and to point out that so far, the community college has a higher enrollment and retention of such population.

My sister happened to be interviewed for the article, and she happened to be misrepresented... well, I was upset. In my fundamentals of journalism class there was something that my professor couldn't emphasize more: always check your facts. Apparently the reporter didn't do a very good job on this and that's how I got a call from University Relations. The person sounded upset and wanted to get in touch with my sister to "fix" the "misinformation" given in the article. Well, the article pointed out a weakness of the administration. That in Salvadoran Spanish is called "estar picado." There were huge mistakes in the article... but those mistakes would not get half of the attention they got if the article hadn't touch RIGHT where it hurts most...

At school there is a lot of talk about diversity. A lot. But there's not much action following the words... And that was pointed out in the article. It hurts... truth hurts when it's not pretty.

Lesson: always check the freaking facts... especially when you want to mess with "the man."

1 comment:

Lurid said...

That's a shame that there was misrepresentation going on. It really stinks when the media warps things like that. Part of why I like being a proofreader--I get to catch that stuff before it goes to print. :)

And yep, that's what my dirty city actually looked like...