Andrew Golis

For an explanation of what this series is all about, read here. For part 1 of the series, read here.

There have been multiple requests on what I write about for this part (here and here). The anonymous reader who requested this series, who I shall from now on refer to as Mystery McGee, asked whether or not I thought the Crimson endorsement cost Clay the election. To answer this question, I’m going to simply lay out the reasons I think Clay lost. I will try to answer Mystery McGee and Anonymous Reader #2′s other questions about endorsements, group politics and whatnot in a later post.

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So, why did Clay lose?

The simple answer is this: people lied, the Crimson let them and we didn’t do a good enough job setting the record straight.

It never occurred to us was that people would lie. Call me naive, but I thought that in this kind of election, in a campus setting, people would tell the truth. We didn’t always say the nicest things about the other campaigns, but not once did we lie or even try to distort the truth. The other campaigns did, the timing and incompetence of some Crimson coverage reinforced those lies and we didn’t do a good enough job setting the record straight.

They said that Clay had bounced the checks. To be clear, Clay has never bounced a check. The checks bouncing fiasco happened when someone else was Treasurer. The first time we noticed them making this accussation was on the announcement board of their facebook group. If my memory serves me, the headline was something like “Clay Capp continues to bounce checks.” When we saw it, we gave the Election Commission a call and asked them to have the other campaign take it down. The Election Commission emailed them (and cc’d me) and said “If you do not remove this message, you risk being fined by the Election Commission for ethically questionable behavior.” They took it down quickly.

Now, I figured it wasn’t a big deal because probably only a few people had read that and probably most of them had been campaign folk who had nothing better to do (like myself!). Plus, the campaign manager of this campaign apologized to Clay for the post. Unfortunately, we heard later, both from individuals who spoke to this other campaign as well as groups who were lobbied by them, that they repeated this attack throughout the campaign. “Do you want more bounced checks?” they demanded to know.

All of this was supported by the Crimson. The day the campaign started they ran a story about an unpaid bill to the Science Center. A minor miscommunication between Clay and the Campus Life Committee resulted in a problem that Clay solved. The article ended with a quote that unfairly blamed Clay. As he said later at the debate, “[blaming him for the problem] was like blaming the janitor who cleans up the spill.” This, by the way, was the article the other campaign used to link to say “Clay Capp continues to bounce checks.”

Later, the Crimson supported this same lie in its article about the debates:

Council Treasurer Clay T. Capp ’06, who is Glazer’s running mate, came under criticism for the 93 council checks to HoCos and student groups that bounced last May.

““There are two checks out of a hundred that caused trouble”,” Capp said, adding that he had begun providing a weekly update of council expenditures and creating a reserve fund to prevent the council from overdrawing in the future.

Pretty damning stuff. The only problem was, it didn’t happen. Clay wasn’t asked about any bounced checks because the panelists, unlike the reporter, apparently, knew that he wasn’t the treasurer when the whole thing occurred and had nothing to do with them. He was asked about the Science Center checks, which is why he said 2 and not 93.



The fact that the Crimson didn’t endorse Clay also supported this set of false perceptions and outright falsifications. I have my own opinions about why the Ed Board made the decision it did, but I won’t get into those here.

Finally, some blame rests on me and the campaign as a whole. We didn’t realize until too late how prevalent these lies and misunderstandings were and didn’t do enough to fight back against them. I made a few calls to see if the Crimson would publish a correction about the debate article, but didn’t worry about it enough to push it through. We thought about sending out emails to house lists with the subject of “Fact Check” or something like that, but worried that it would just be another opportunity for the other campaigns to attack us and use the Crimson and it’s half-assed reporting to do so.

In some ways, this all points to the problem with the fact that the Crimson has such a complete monopoly. No one really reads the Indy, Salient or Perspective. Because of this, there is no competition to call out mistakes or make sure that their standards are higher. While the Crimson is fundamentally a good quality paper, it’s coverage can be extremely sloppy. It’s like my Dad says (he’s a newspaperman), “every story is 100% accurate except those of which you have personal knowledge.”

Now, some of these things may seem ticky-tacky. A quote here, a bad article there, that’s life. It’s true, that is life. Unfortunately for us, each of these things happened together and fed off of each other. Consider also that Clay lost by only 50 votes on the first count. When 4,000 are cast and you lose by 50, every little bit counts.

So there you have it: lies, bad journalism and not enough effort to counteract both.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 15th, 2005 at 2:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.