Friday, December 9, 2016

Editorial: Response to the complaint about 'Hate Crimes' article

From the Editorial Board of The Lion's Tale

At the last New Hope-Solebury school board meeting, which took place on Dec. 5, the Lion’s Tale received a direct complaint regarding an article posted in the third issue of the Lion’s Tale, titled “Rise in hate crimes across America post-Trump election.”
 The person who stated their complaint believed that this article did not do a fair job at showing both sides of the story, and called to attention the sources left at the end of the article, which were placed there to enforce the credibility of the hate crime accounts covered in the article.
 We at the Lion’s Tale politely disagree with this accusation. This piece is primarily a hard news piece, calling attention to the unquestionable rise in hate crimes that have occurred since the election. The list of sources were all news pieces from CNN, USA Today, NYTimes, NBC, Time Magazine, Dallas Morning News, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. None of these news agencies are strictly left-wing, and are all highly reputable. The writers of the article made a point to only get their information from these neutral sources, which is specifically why they did not look at Fox News, nor MSNBC, two explicitly right-wing and left-wing news platforms. What was addressed in the article was as neutral and unbiased as possible, and reported purely fact.
 Here at the Lion’s Tale, we all work extremely hard on our newspaper, analyze and triple-check all articles, and on top of that have each issue approved by the school administration. In journalism class, we take anywhere from 10 minutes to the entire class period reviewing news from all viewpoints, and are instructed that, if writing a news piece, to remain unbiased and to get information from sources that don’t lean primarily in any direction.
   In addition, we post our articles in an online edition of the newspaper, accessible to all, via the New Hope-Solebury High School website. This online format gives readers the chance to comment on the articles, of which all comments are made public. We gladly invite all of our readers to comment as they see fit, and even share more information with us. We feel that it is important to see stories from all angles in order to write unbiased pieces.
  It is in no way our intention to make any person feel uncomfortable or offended by our writing pieces. While we respectfully disagree in the case of this specific article, it has certainly been an important reminder to all of our staff writers, editors, and advisors to exercise care when presenting news pieces. We thank the given member of the community for their avid readership of our newspaper and their various other comments and inquiries that have helped to make our online edition interactive.

The New Hope-Solebury Lion’s Tale Editorial Board is made up of Lexi Anderson, Bailey Hendricks,