[Full Disclosure: I have a friend studying in California, but I'm pretty sure he's in LA, not SF. He's always talking about surfing and shit like that.]
The police were pretty obviously out of line in California last week. Lets compare journalism. That’s clearly the most pertinent thing to talk about:
The Daily Californian vs The San Francisco Chronicle
(Alt link for The Daily Californian)
The Issue: The protest ends
The Nutshell: … the protest ended last week.
I want to first of all point out the disparate ledes here, the Chronicle writes:
“Forty protesters who barricaded themselves inside Wheeler Hall for 11 hours Friday didn’t win back the 38 custodial jobs they demanded, nor did they persuade the UC regents to rescind their decision to increase tuition by 32 percent next fall.”
The Californian writes:
“The more than 12-hour occupation of UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall by a group of 40 protesters ended with their release at about 7:30 p.m. Friday.”
They have way nicer racks than we do, though. Shit.
What an interesting tonal shift. What works better? The Daily Californian is more workmanlike, it focuses solely on the “what happened” which is that the protest is over. But the Chronicle’s take on “what happened” is that the protestors failed. How pertinent is that to the barest bone news that Wheeler Hall is open again? And how critical is that extra hour in the Californian’s title?
Consider the nut graphs while you think. The Chronicle:
“But their daylong protest spoke directly to the mood of students, faculty and university workers, who demonstrated their frustration with ever-increasing fees and ever-decreasing jobs.”
The Californian:
“As hundreds of other demonstrators cheered, the building occupants were ultimately allowed to exit the building without handcuffs after occupying a room on the second floor of the campus building beginning sometime before 6:30 a.m. Friday. There were an estimated 1,000 people in the crowd throughout the day.”
Some more detail in the californian’s, and both stories completely reliable, but look at the tone. Cheering demonstrators? Unshackled protests that do not reflect the arrests made? Noting how many people were cheering/there? Tell me that’s not bias.
And this is something I haven’t really addressed. Student papers have lots of good contacts — it’s a real strength of theirs — but then they are students at the end of the day. They’re going to sympathize with and make students look good.
To the credit of Jamie Applegate, Mihir Zaveri, George Ashworth, Angelica Dongallo, Tomer Ovadia, Javier Panzar, and Zach E.J. Williams — who must have had a huge fight over who got to hold the pen — the piece balances itself late in the game with quotes denigrating the protestors, but you have to wonder how many people get there, given how long the average person’s attention span is for an article.
I think that the big difference between the pieces is that the Chronicle is much more interested in the implications of the protest — but more negligible in representing the police action. In that, we’ve essentially got two major issues in one story.
But lets at least recognize that both papers utilize a consistent, well organized style and appropriate, reliable sources. The pieces both technically impress me, which is everyone’s goal OBVIOUSLY.
VERDICT:
San Francisco Chronicle.
I really like both the pieces, and I really hate that the brutality wasn’t more stressed in the SF’s piece, but I feel like the information they focus on is more useful to me in the sense of how things went down and what exactly the next step in the story is going to be.
I didn’t mention this earlier and I should have: It’s really cool that the californian embeded videos next to their article. But videos and text aren’t interchangeable. Though, damn but it changes your perspective on the story.
