O

ver 
the 
past 
year, 

I’ve seen a dramatic 
shift 
in 
reputable 

journalistic outlets’ — like 
The New York Times, the 
Wall Street Journal and The 
Washington Post — coverage 
of the presidency to what 
individuals might perceive as 
being more partisan than in the 
past. In many ways, this shift 
can be seen as a response to 
the pages of lies that PolitiFact 
has noted over the course of 
President 
Donald 
Trump’s 

presidency and his campaign. 
Put yourself in the shoes of a 
journalist: How do you cover 
a lie while making sure that 
A) your article isn’t seen as 
inherently partisan and B) 
your information establishes 
that the lie is, well, a lie. The 
New York Times has been 
grappling with this problem 
ever since Trump announced 
his candidacy for president. 
Despite the lies that Trump 
has told over the course of his 
presidency, newspapers still 
have 
difficulty 
explaining 

these 
kinds 
of 
falsehoods 

from a political official. In 
NYT Public Editor Liz Spayd’s 
article addressing The New 
York Times trying to grapple 
with these falsehoods, Spayd 
actually suggests using the 
term “lie” sparingly, something 
that should seem incredibly 
concerning. Because of Trump’s 
tendency to lie throughout his 
presidency, mainstream print 
journalism has yet to adapt to 
the era of Trump and has failed 
in many ways at effectively 
communicating 
how 
the 

normative values in American 
democracy are being broken.

I 
see 
Trump’s 
successful 

campaign 
as 
coming 
from 

this journalistic hesitancy. In 
attempts to ensure an article has 
a lack of partisan slant, the news 
will proceed to use language 
that seems distanced from the 
facts. This is normal, and many 
communications and journalism 
scholars would say this is critical 
for the news to do its job. With 

that said, this logic doesn’t 
quite acknowledge how this 
can be perceived by an average 
person reading the news. In 
attempting to make something 
feel “objective” — and many 
individuals, including myself, 
take serious issue with the idea 
of objectivity as a realistic goal 
— mainstream outlets can also 
make the news feel normal and 
ordinary. These stories can feel 
as if something that might be 
seen as “breaking the norm” 
as being an event that should 
happen in how we understand 
American democracy. Trump 
has broken so many norms that 
it’s hard for mainstream outlets 
to ratchet up the rhetoric when 
there are already so many 
values that are different from 
past presidencies.

To think of an example, recall 

the Access Hollywood tape. 
The New York Times decided 
that the article about the tape 
would be titled “Donald Trump 
Apology Caps Day of Outrage 
Over Lewd Tape.” The Times’s 
attempt to be impartial can 
appear as if this were ordinary. 
The word “outrage” can have 
some serious implications and 
connotations, 
but 
it 
doesn’t 

mention the comments Trump 
made on its own — quite literally 
why the story exists. Stories like 
these exemplify how the actual 
event has deviated from the 
norm within the article itself, 
but this sort of language in the 
title doesn’t do the article justice, 
and a casual reader may leave 
without fully understanding its 
importance. What it doesn’t tell 
the reader is that a man running 
for president said that he could 
sexually assault women. These 
horrific moments need to be said 
and written in ways that allow 
the reader to understand the 
gravity of what is happening in 
the political sphere, something 
that I don’t see happening in 
mainstream news outlets.

However, there is still hope 

in 
the 
journalism 
industry. 

Journalists are changing the 
way they present news, and there 

have even grown unlikely news 
sources that can help individuals 
interpret what is actually going 
on. When we think about the 
news, we think of the CNNs 
or The New York Times of 
the world as the only spaces 
where individuals get their 
news. Comedy shows rarely 
addressed politics even 10 or 20 
years ago, excluding The Daily 
Show and The Colbert Report. 
Now, however, more and more 
night shows and comedy shows 
are addressing serious topics 
in funny ways. Vox writer 
Carlos Maza, has had his finger 
on the pulse of TV political 
information for a while now, 
but his argument about how 
comedians 
have 
improved 

political awareness has become 
particularly salient: Comedians 
have the ability to call out 
ridiculous arguments and do 
so in comical ways, and it has 
started permeating into TV 
journalism as well. CNN’s Jake 
Tapper has increasingly become 
tougher in his questioning and 
statements, and it has garnered 
him millions of followers.

Print journalism needs to find 

outlets that can allow for the 
same sorts of interpretation — 
and, frankly, it needs to be done 
in ways outside of the opinion 
column. As we see print news 
employing more multimedia in 
their articles, these companies 
need to continue to evolve and 
change if they want to be able to 
inform Americans and call out 
events as normatively “breaking 
the rules” in our democracy. 
Read time for articles are 
dramatically lower, and this 
means that news stories need 
to be aggressive in getting 
important information in ways 
that a reader can interpret 
and take with them. Print 
journalism isn’t going to die, 
yet, but it could if the era of 
Trump permeates too far into 
the journalism industry.

Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Tuesday, January 30, 2018

DAYTON HARE

Managing Editor

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

ALEXA ST. JOHN

Editor in Chief
 ANU ROY-CHAUDHURY AND 

ASHLEY ZHANG
Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 

All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

Ian Leach can be reached at 

ileach@umich.edu.

Megan Burns

Samantha Goldstein

Emily Huhman
Jeremy Kaplan

Sarah Khan

 
 
 
 

Lucas Maiman
Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury

Ali Safawi

 
 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

Kevin Sweitzer
Tara Jayaram
 Ashley Zhang

Ellery Rosenzweig

Elena Hubbell

I

f you’re white, you may 
not see it happening, but 
I want you to know our 

democracy is in a real crisis. 
By definition, a democracy is 
a government in which people 
participate. People of color 
are living with unimaginable 
oppression, and while you may 
say, “I’ve heard this before,” I 
contend you may be mistaken.

I consider myself somewhat 

aware, 
compassionate 
and 

even active in trying to make 
the world a better place for all 
of us. I’m currently taking a 
course on international human 
rights, and our textbook is 
“Human 
Rights 
in 
World 

History” by Peter Stearns. In 
the textbook’s introduction, 
Stearns writes “the United 
States government regularly 
produces reports on other 
countries’ 
human 
rights 

record…” However, rather than 
analyzing other countries, we 
need to pause and, instead, 
take a serious look inward.

On Jan. 19, I attended an 

event hosted by the University 
of Michigan focusing on the 
“lived experiences of Black 
Americans.” Rackham students 
Steven Moore and Hakeem J. 
Jefferson were the organizers 
and shared information with 
me regarding the panel on 
mass incarceration, writing 
in an email on Jan. 23, “We 
hope (to) drive home the 
massive impact this has on the 
everyday lives of so many black 
and brown people in the U.S.”

The news wasn’t hopeful. 

Racism 
continues 
to 
grow 

deeply 
while 
almost 
all 

of 
us 
well-intended 
white 

people 
continue 
to 
look 

away — liberals, moderates, 
conservatives, 
even 
many 

activists who take on different 
causes. Just ask Charnesia 
Corley. 
Andrea 
Ritchie, 
a 

nationally-recognized expert 
on policing issues, told us what 
happened just two years ago to 
Corley when she was a 20-year 
old African-American student. 
She was pulled out of her car 
for failure to stop at a stop sign 
and forced down to the ground 
while a female police officer 
pulled off her pants, forced 
her legs open and probed her 
vagina for 11 minutes in the 
parking lot. This happened on 
what started out as a regular 
day in June to an innocent 
young woman just going about 
living her life. The unjust, 
cloaked term for this is a cavity 
search. Putting your fingers in 
someone without their consent 
is, by definition, rape. It was 
done by the police, making it 
state-sanctioned rape. I am 
hard-pressed to believe this 
would have happened if she 
were a white woman in Ann 
Arbor — if she were me. This 
should concern all of us for the 
obvious humanitarian reasons, 
but also because of the impact 
on our democracy.

I also learned just how 

egregious Driving While Black, 
or DWB, is. Again, you’ve 
heard this before, right? But 
Frank Baumgartner, professor 
of political science at the 
University of North Carolina 
at Chapel Hill, has analyzed 55 
million traffic stops in every 
way possible. He and his team 
of researchers demonstrated 
not only the incredibly high 
number of times people of color 
are pulled over, but they also 
correlated voting behaviors 
and outcomes of this kind of 
treatment by the state. In the 

study, the researchers found 
that “a mere interaction with 
a police officer (not resulting 
in arrest) is associated with a 
reduction in the probability of 
voting of almost 10 percent.”

You 
may 
be 
thinking 

to 
yourself 
(because 
you 

certainly wouldn’t say it out 
loud), “Yeah, this is all really 
horrible, but what does it really 
have to do with democracy?” 
We 
allow 
skin 
color 
to 

continue to be counterfactual 
markers of social differences 
and resulting life experiences. 
White 
people 
need 
to 

acknowledge the word that 
makes so many of us cringe: 
privilege. I’m speaking here of 
the specific privilege to simply 
possess the desire to engage in 
our government. A very real 
outcome of state-sanctioned 
discrimination is a group of 
people who lack a desire to 
engage in anything having 
to do with that state. When 
our state disempowers and 
discourages civic engagement 
of 
the 
Black 
community, 

we cannot claim to have a 
functioning democracy. Why 
would Charnesia Corley want 
to participate in a government 
that not only allows something 
like this to happen to her, but 
was the perpetrator?

Stearns has this to say 

about revolution: “People in 
various societies at various 
times, had attacked reigning 
governments 
because 
of 

economic 
deprivation, 

injustice, corruption, unfair 
property distribution.” I say, 
make no mistake; we may just 
require a revolution.

State discrimination threatens democracy

HOLLY HONIG | OP-ED

Holly Honig is an LSA Junior 

T

he recently published 
Campus Affordability 
Guide by the University 

of Michigan’s Central Student 
Government 
has 
produced 

understandable and justifiable 
backlash. 
Affordability 
in 

Ann Arbor is a structural 
issue 
and 
will 
hardly 
be 

solved by suggesting students 
spend less money. One of 
the biggest costs to students 
is rent, which continues to 
increase every year. As the 
University continues to admit 
more students and refuses to 
build more housing for those 
students, more are pushed 
into 
the 
private 
market. 

Due to the high cost of land 
and developers seeking to 
maximize profits, the market 
will 
continue 
to 
supply 

unaffordable luxury student 
high-rises. Students, however, 
need not be powerless as 
consumers in the housing 
market. One recommendation 
of 
the 
affordability 
guide 

that CSG should pursue is the 
reformation of the Ann Arbor 
Tenants’ Union. The AATU 
was formed in 1968 as the 
coordinating committee of a 
city-wide rent strike initially 
protesting the poor housing 
at a time when 90 percent of 
rental properties failed to 
meet city code requirements. 
After 
its 
formation, 
the 

AATU 
undertook 
several 

more strike and advocacy 
actions 
to 
combat 
failure 

to meet code requirements, 
privacy violations and sexual 
harassment 
in 
cooperation 

with women’s groups and anti-
racism efforts. In addition to 
serving the whole of the Ann 
Arbor area, the AATU received 
most of its funding from 
Central Student Government, 
then known as the Michigan 
Student Assembly. In 2004, 
CSG 
stopped 
funding 
the 

union, despite 58 percent of 
the student body voting to 
continue funding the union 
through a one-dollar increase 

in tuition. CSG’s decision to 
stop funding the AATU led to 
its dissolution in 2004.

CSG provided funds to the 

AATU as well as office space in 
the Michigan Union because of 
the benefits the AATU provided 
to students. The vast majority 
of students are renters in Ann 
Arbor and renting for the first 
time, making us particularly 
vulnerable 
to 
predatory 

actions by landlords. Due 
to CSG funding, the AATU 
provided 
free 
services 

to students such as legal 
advice when dealing with 
landlord issues as well as 
lobbying efforts on behalf of 
the city’s renters. At the time, 
CSG incorrectly claimed the 
AATU was ineffective. While 
students can get legal advice 
from Student Legal Services 
when dealing with landlord 
issues, it hardly fulfills the same 
advocacy on behalf of students 
that the AATU once did.

A great deal of the need for 

the reformation of the AATU 
is the disempowered status 
of students. Looking at the 
wards of Ann Arbor, from 
which City Council members 
are elected, one notices that 
they look like slices of pie. 
They are shaped this way for 
an explicit and by no means 
accidental purpose. At the 
height of student activism in 
the late ‘60s, students wielded 
substantial influence over city 
council. When this activism 
subsided in the ‘80s, the wards 
were redrawn to weaken and 
disempower students.

Additionally, 
because 

Ann Arbor is a Democratic 
stronghold, 
City 
Council 

members often run unopposed 
in the general election, thus 
making 
the 
only 
election 

of 
meaning 
the 
August 

party primary. Students are 
often not on campus at the 
beginning 
of 
August, 
and 

thus the average age of the 
primary voters is mid- to late-
60s. Because students don’t 

vote for the members of City 
Council, the city government 
has little electoral incentive to 
represent our interests. While 
Zach Ackerman, D-Ward 3, 
was able to win a seat on the 
council as a student, he is the 
exception and not the rule. 
He is also the only member of 
the 11-member city council who 
rents and is not a homeowner, a 
significant underrepresentation 
considering that 40 percent of 
Ann Arbor residents are renters.

The 
reformation 
of 
the 

AATU would give students 
political power as renters. 
It would have the ability to 
influence City Council year-
round when the students are 
not here and be an institution 
that represents our interests. 
When the AATU existed, it 
demonstrated its power and 
influence by initiating rent 
strikes and even suing the city 
of Ann Arbor. In 2004, students 
felt that the AATU should 
continue its existence, and it is 
unfortunate that CSG did not 
honor the will of the students 
at that time. While restoring 
the AATU would not be a 
silver bullet solution to fixing 
affordability in Ann Arbor, its 
return would be something 
CSG could do to improve 
affordability in Ann Arbor 
and an effective use of student 
tuition dollars; providing an 
important service to students 
that the affordability guide 
does not. The tenants’ union 
at the University of Illinois at 
Urbana-Champaign was used 
by nearly 8,000 students in 
2015 and assisted in writing 
a 
comprehensive 
landlord-

tenant ordinance in Urbana. 
If there is one thing that 
comes out of the backlash 
to the Campus Affordability 
Guide, it should be for CSG to 
take action on its call for the 
reformation of the Ann Arbor 
Tenants’ Union.

Christopher Olson is an LSA Junior

Reform the Ann Arbor Tenants’ Union

CHRISTOPHER OLSON | OP-ED

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Print journalism in Trump’s presidency

IAN LEACH | COLUMN

SARAH NEFF | CONTACT SARAH AT SANE@UMICH.EDU

