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More Follies at the Daily D

Monday, January 15, 2001

The Week in Review is acutely aware that we mock The Daily Dartmouth entirely too often in these pages. But they make it so easy, it's hard to resist.

The day after the election, for example, in their November 8 issue, an immense headline blared, 'BUSH WINS,' claiming that Bush carried Florida on election night and won the election. That part is entirely reasonable; a number of other newspapers (not the good ones, though) made the same mistake. That's not what's funny.

Under the headline, in true Daily D style, is an article by the Associated Press. Yet, while the headline declares Bush the winner, that's not what the article says. The article says that the race was too close to call: 'AP's analysis showed the narrowest of margins with final votes still being tallied,' it reads, and then adds, 'Bush or Gore, the next president will be submitting his first-year agenda to a deeply divided Congress'—acknowledging that Bush had not, in fact, won the election (yet). All of which makes The D either incredibly prescient or totally inept.

The Week in Review surmises that the folks at The Daily D were watching the network news when Tom Brokaw declared Bush the winner, and inserted that into their headline without even reading their cover story.

If that's what they want to do, fine. But they should listen more closely. In The D's first issue of 2001, on January 4, Staff Columnist Hermant Joshi writes, 'Other selections for Bush's cabinet and agencies, such as former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats for secretary of defense and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to head the Pentagon, seem to point in the direction of a one-sided, conservative cabinet that effectively damages the spirit of bipartisanship.' Aside from the whininess, what should strike readers that being defense secretary and heading the Pentagon are, appropriately, the same thing. In fact, they're being done by the same person, Donald Rumsfeld, who is Bush's pick for defense—not Dan Coats.

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