Six years ago a strange tradition began. Before every Super Bowl the network hosting gets an exclusive one-on-one interview with the President of the United States.
This last Sunday, Fox hosted the game and they had their most watched pundit, Bill O’Reilly interview President Barrack Obama.
The interview started plainly enough. After brief introductions, O’Reilly quickly turned his questions towards the fumbles with health care, asking when President Obama realized there were problems with healthcare.gov.
Fair enough, the rollout of healthcare.gov is a well-documented mess. President Obama responded by saying that after a month and half of tooling around, “three million young people signed up under their parents plan,” as well as others using the site to sign up for Medicare and Medicaid.
Yet here’s where the interview takes a turn for the worst. O’Reilly interrupted President Obama (this becomes a frequent occurrence in the interview) and began what would become a slew of asking largely accusatory questions that President Obama largely tried to clarify before answering.
There is never a wrong time to take a moment of self-reflection. Though the biases of many news outlets are well-documented and have been long commented on, The Xavierite tries never to fall into games of favoritism or personal beliefs.
Journalists serve many valuable functions within society. One of the most important is that they should always serve as the watchdog of the people.
Mr. O’Reilly may think that he was serving that function, from our point of view, what seemed like a system of questions aimed at trapping President Obama instead of allowing a natural interview to take place and discovering fact and allowing any fiction or unsatisfactory answers to occur and pushing those concepts further.
As journalists it is important to remember that there is a difference between watchdog and witch hunter.
This does not mean that journalists must play softball with the people that they interview, but they must always be fair.
This is where the importance of the receiver of media comes in. In other words, this is why the feedback of readers is so important.
We at The Xavierite always wish to hear from readers to comment on the job that we are doing. Should something come out that seems particularly unfair to any particular reader or should our coverage on certain campus events seem too one-sided it is important that we be informed. Sometimes it is necessary for the watchdog to be watched.
Perhaps the best way that this can be done is by writing a Letter to the Editor.
Our policy for writing a Letter to the Editor can always be found next to the staff editorial (i.e. the article you’re reading right now).
Letters may be submitted for any number of reasons. We always appreciate hearing feedback from the reader.
It is important not only for the staff of The Xavierite to keep you well informed, but sometimes we need information back on how we’re doing.
Here at The Xavierite we try our best, but we falter and stumble at times.
We need to know when we do those things and what exactly you notice about those mistakes so that they can be better corrected.
The Xavierite Staff