Here is what I am running in the Sun this week. Please pass it on with my humble apologies. In the past, I have always just run what has been sent me. This has never been a problem in the past, but apparently I need to start censoring. I didn’t realize what a sensitive subject this was.
I am officially in the doghouse (pardon the pun) for running Jim Fraiser’s column criticizing Mississippi State football. Did I mention my paternal grandfather Oliver Emmerich, founder of Emmerich Newspapers, and his wife Lyda Will were both proud graduates of Mississippi State?
I guess my best explanation is that everybody makes mistakes. Over the course of a year, we run thousands of articles. Sooner or later one may offend someone. It’s not intentional and we try to learn from it.
One caller told me to stay right where I was because he was coming to whup a part of my anatomy. I encouraged him not to waste precious energy on me and gave him Fraiser’s cell phone number.
Several friends asked me how I could be so stupid to anger half the Sun’s readership. I told them to never underestimate the capacity of human stupidity.
I didn’t go to Ole Miss or State. Although I enjoy football, my interest in it is fairly superficial. There was a gap in my knowledge of the culture of the Sun’s readership. I totally underestimated the intensity of emotions regarding football. My bad.
The column seemed silly to me but I figured everybody loves football so I ran it. I saw it as a humorous ribbing in preparation for the Egg Bowl. I thought maybe a State fan would respond with a humorous rebuttal making fun of Ole Miss. All in good fun. Note to self: Humor and satire are tricky. One man’s spoof is another man’s poison.
When the Ole Miss fans yell “Go to hell State” and the State fans yell back “Go to hell Ole Miss,” it never occurred to me some people were serious. I thought it was all in good fun. I thought ribbing was part of the whole fun of a rivalry.
I suppose the fact that college football coaches make more money than college presidents should have given me a clue. Apparently there is nothing light-hearted about college football in Mississippi.
I try to run everything submitted to the opinion pages by Northsiders. That’s what a community newspaper is all about. I don’t like serving as a censor. Just because I run it doesn’t mean I agree with it. That’s my attempt to be true to freedom of the press.
Opinion pages are by their very nature tricky. That’s because people are different and everybody has their own opinion. Think about how complex and sensitive a single human being is. Now multiply that by 30,000 readers. It’s not as simple as it may seem.
In addition, the feedback loop at a newspaper is fairly limited. It’s like sending a message in a bottle. For 99.9999 percent of our readers, we have no idea how a particular article was received. We learn by trial and error.
After 40 years of newspaper writing, I’ve learned to be cautious. This learning process has been fraught with huge mistakes. Our guest columnists are amateurs. Hopefully, they will learn as well. Many give up after their first dose of withering criticism.
Making it even more complicated, there is a tradeoff between being boring and being controversial. Boring papers are not read. Controversy tends to generate readership. If you try to please everybody, your paper becomes bland and readership declines.
It is the proverbial two-edged sword: Too controversial, you make everybody mad. Too bland, nobody bothers to read.
That being said, I always consider it a personal failure when readers are upset. The problem is you just never know what will set people off. Hindsight is 20-20.
Awhile back, a Northsider submitted a pro-choice column on abortion. It was well-written and the issue was pertinent because the governor had just closed the only abortion clinic in Mississippi.
No doubt, the Northside Sun readership is heavily pro-life. So what to do? Should I only publish columns that will be popular? Or should I foster debate and discussion, which I see as an important role of an opinion page?
I ran the column and braced myself for an avalanche of hate e-mails. Surprisingly, I did not receive one negative comment. I did receive a very well-written pro-life rebuttal which I was able to run the next week.
Even if I tried my best to have the least controversial opinion page possible, I would still miss the mark and make people mad. You simply can’t please all the people all the time.
Both State and Ole Miss are huge schools with beautiful campuses, rich programs and excellent professors. Academically, there is no difference between the two.
