Bias

For my article this week I interviewed all the candidates for student body president/vice president. The only problem is that one of the guys running for president is not my most favorite person in the world, to put it nicely. We had a problem last semester when I interviewed him for a different story and since then I have not liked him and the whole TNH staff doesn't like him either.

So, when I realized that he was running for president I was upset because this meant that I had to write about all the great things that he would want to do. All I wanted to do was write about how he's crazy and would be a terrible president, but I obviously couldn't do that. Before the interviews started though, he approached me and said that he didn't need to be interviewed because he had made a press release for TNH already. Basically, he didn't want to mess up in an interview so he wrote everything out beforehand, worded exactly how he wanted.

When I told my editor about this he told me not give the guy what he wanted. So instead I wrote that he declined an interview. I then briefly listed the main points of his press release but didn't go into detail. I am biased against this guy and my article probably reflected this, but what I wrote was true. Some people may think it was harsh, but I didn't make anything up or say anything bad about him. I was just happy that I was able to be biased in a way that was ok. At first I didn't know I could do that, but now I'm glad to know that I can. It's not something I'll do often, but this guy is a different story.