Daily Bruin’s lack of impartiality skews facts
By Jeff Lazarus
How would you feel if you opened up the Wall Street Joumal one
morning to find the news headline "Clinton’s Re-election Will
Improve Economy"? Or how about a frontpage Los Angeles Times
article titled "Death Penalty Instrumental in Reducing Crime"? You
would probably be shocked and justifiably so. Therefore, imagine my
horror upon firing open the Daily Bruin on Friday, April 21, and
seeing the story, "Affirmative action necessary to reduce gender
bias."
This is without a doubt the single most unprofessional thing I
have ever seen in a newspaper on any level. (Take my word for it
 I worked on a high school newspaper and I’ve seen it all in
terms being unprofessional.) With a single stroke, The Bruin threw
out the window any iota of an image of impartiality. How can you
expect any reader to believe that the newspaper reports (as opposed
to skews) news when you write such headlines in the news
section?
The problems with the article go well beyond the headline. The
writer openly cites sources such as the "1995 Glass Ceiling
Commission report," whose name alone indicates bias. The article
serves up statistics without fully explaining their implications,
or compares them to one another in inappropriate ways.
For example, the percentage of doctorates awarded to white women
last year (which, according to the article, was almost 65 percent)
was compared to the percentage of UCLA’s female faculty which is
female (which, according to the article, is 22 percent of the total
faculty), implicating that those doing the hiring are sexist.
Since UCLA’s faculty is not drawn exclusively from those who
were given doctorates last year, that one number has very little to
do with the other. UCLA’s current faculty could more accurately be
compared to the pool of those who received doctorates in the past
40 or so years, since that is the pool out of which our current
faculty was selected.
The article reads like an editorial, constantly lending support
to the position that "there is still discrimination against women."
(To be technical, in my view, in an approximately 13-inch story, 10
separate statements or sets of statistics are used to support
gender-based affirmative action. Let’s give credit where credit is
due: How did Morita squeeze them all in?) Literally zero support is
given to the opposing position. In fact, according to the article,
there is no opposing position; one is not even mentioned.
By openly ignoring one side of a controversial issue within a
news article, The Bruin loses credibility and exposes itself as
being no less biased than The American Spectator. The people
responsible for this are not only the article’s writer, but also
news editor Tram Nguyen, editor in chief Matea Gold, all of the
copy editors and all of the assistant news editors. Whatever
judgment or logic they used (if they used any at all) reflect
horribly not only on The Bruin, but by implication on the campus
and student body itself  in other words, on me.
It’s too bad I don’t have a subscription to your "news"paper,
because if I did, I could cancel it. As it is, I’m pledging not to
read it for my remaining three-plus years on campus, and that will
have to do.
Lazarus is a first-year political science student.