What a week it’s been, readers. We’ve got presidential candidates throwing shade at one another, Gainesville residents yelling at Florida governors in Starbucks, Star Wars Easter eggs and secrets circling our social media — and oh, yes, finals week rapidly approaching to wreak havoc on our precious grades. But in the meantime, thank you, readers, for tuning into our vain attempt at making sense of the world, our long-winded banter, our latest segment of…
Darts & Laurels
By now, you’ve probably heard of the interview The New York Daily News had with Bernie Sanders. “Pretty close to a disaster,” read subsequent headlines. For many media outlets, this interview was the long-awaited, quintessential “ah-hah, gotcha!” moment in which Sanders finally exposed himself as “all talk, no walk” on providing specific answers on how he’d actually break up the banks.
But if you take the time to closely read the transcript of this interview, you’ll quickly find it was really The Daily News who didn’t have the facts together. In pressing Sanders on how exactly he’d break up the big banks, The Daily News brought up the Federal Reserve’s authority, to which Bernie responded with confusion.
And rightly so: The Fed has less to do with breaking up the banks than The Daily News suggested. Yet The Daily News persistently pressed Sanders with this notion and proceeded to run negative articles dismissing him as having his head in the clouds. The same thing happened on foreign policy: The Daily News asked Sanders how he felt on President Obama’s removal of drone authority from the CIA, to which Sanders responded with confusion. Yeah, that’s because in June 2015, Obama actually let the CIA keep their authority on drones. And for some reason, The Daily News editorial board has been slow to clarify these mistakes.
Please, readers, before you base your judgments on this article or share it on Facebook, take a moment to realize how fabricated and slanted the interview was. So, a dart to The Daily News for their blatant attempt at “gotcha” journalism, and a laurel to those journalists who did their jobs and accurately reported on the interview, such as Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and The Young Turks.
Now, onto a real issue of utter controversy: the intersection of Museum Road and Reitz Union Drive. You all know it: those crosswalks right outside of the Reitz. This intersection is where happiness goes to die, where cars go to sit still at 0 mph for what feels like forever during rush hour, where seas of pedestrians and speeding drivers collide. Kidding aside, cars sit awkwardly waiting for the crosswalk to be completely empty, while pedestrians stroll through without regard for traffic or surrounding drivers. We give a dart to this intersection and a laurel to those brave souls who eventually approve a streetlight permit there.
And lastly, we extend a laurel to “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” for hosting Babymetal, a Japanese metal band, on the show Tuesday.
Surely Colbert’s producers knew the thrashing drums and distorted guitar would be a little much for the show’s audience, so we commend their willingness to push the musical envelope of late-night television. If any of you have been dying to add new music to your Spotify mix, here’s the perfect band. What better to keep you awake during your all-nighters than a head-banging session at Marston Science Library?
