In class we discussed the editing blunders that were on the front page of The Parthenon. Their lead stories about the basketball teams taking on the Capitol Classic had some oversights that could have been avoided.
The headlines for each article were as follows, "Marshall to face West Virginia in Chesapeake Energy Capital Classic" and "Women's basketball takes on no. 9 WVU in capital classic". These might seem o.k. but in reality they have sexism written all over them. If The Parthenon writes "women's basketball" they should have also written "Men's basketball". The fact that Marshall refers to the men's team is totally sexist, but I will admit that when most think basketball they assume men's. Just like when people talk football or soccer, they are talking about men's sports.
There were a couple of factual errors including the reporter stating that WVU women's team had lost four games, when they had only one loss. The time of the women's game was incorrect. A grammatical error included when the reporters referred to the Herd, they used "their" and not "it".
The men's basketball story also started with a time element, "Tonight ..." which is never supposed to be used. Time elements should be used as close to the verb as possible, and should never start a sentence.
While The Parthenon did make mistakes, that is part of the learning experience we are supposed to be having at Marshall. This is the time we can make those mistakes and learn from them, because the real world will not be so kind about the errors that were made on the front page. In all reality, many Marshall students probably didn't think twice about the headlines, or the grammatical errors. But nevertheless, it is our jobs as journalists to bring these errors to light so that we may learn from them.
No comments:
Post a Comment