IUSA season in full swing

Covering elections can be a difficult task for newspapers, and reporting on IU's student government is no exception. With the announcement last week of two parties vying to lead the IU Student Association, the Indiana Daily Student is preparing to objectively cover the two tickets both on our front page and on our editorial page. From now until the elections, IDS news editors will work to make sure our coverage stays balanced even as our opinion staff formulates its own views on the various candidates.\nIDS staffers listen to complaints each election year that our coverage is somehow slanted toward one candidate or another. Inevitably, the best compliment we receive is when every single party accuses us of bias toward the other. That, I believe, actually validates the objectivity of our work. \nBut a great deal of effort does go into keeping bias out of the newspaper. An IUSA beat reporter is appointed each year and that reporter follows the campaigns of all the parties running until a winner is decided -- whether that's a day after the ballots close or a month after a lengthy appeals process begins.\nDuring that time, editors scrutinize every facet of our coverage. From the wording of a headline to the placement of a story on the page to the order in which candidates are listed or reported on in a story, we strive to make sure each one gets equal treatment.\nFor example, if we run a story about underage drinking arrests one day (a sure-fire IUSA issue year in and year out) and a story about academic standards the next, we might reverse the order of the parties we talk about in each one. You won't pick up your newspaper and read about Party A first thing in every single story, while Party B is buried somewhere on page 11. \nIn our annual election preview edition, each party is given equal space to answer the same questions about why it should be elected. Editors work to make sure that same sense of equality shines through all of our coverage as best as possible.\nBut even if we do all of those things to perfection, the views of our Opinion staff still convince some people that our IUSA news coverage is biased toward a party. It's a perfectly understandable criticism: Why should the reader believe a front page news story to be fair if an editorial on page six extols the virtues of one party while bitterly criticizing another? \nWe will attempt to be transparent this semester in the way our process works to quell any fears about our objectivity. The opinion editorial board -- a group made up of the two opinion editors and the weekly and biweekly columnists -- might very well endorse a particular candidate (and it might choose not to). It will be entirely up to the board, without any input from the staffers on the news side who objectively report and edit on the campaigns. The editorial board will discuss IUSA in all facets and offer an informed opinion. Just like you, the news-side IDS staffers will read the views of the editorial board when they're printed in the paper.