Daily Lobo not biased against Schmidly, just doing its job

Editor,

Regarding student Jordan Sayre's letter entitled "Daily Lobo has been biased in coverage of Schmidly" on Feb. 23, it's journalism 101 to know that when a dog bites a man, it is not news, but when a man bites a dog, it is news. What David Schmidly does right is not news because that is what he is expected to do and is being paid to do. What Schmidly does wrong (or what most people would believe is wrong) is news and not a lack of objective reporting.

The Daily Lobo is trying to be a news source, not a blog or a TV news commentator. There is no journalistic responsibility to print "representation from different views" on a news item. If Schmidly did something extraordinarily wonderful, that would be news, too. To me, something extraordinarily

wonderful would be to take a big cut in pay; or to promise to not take any more money from already struggling academic departments; or to shrink his top-heavy administration by laying off, cutting salaries and consolidating duties; or to announce that no one in his family will get a job at UNM or for a major contractor with UNM; or make a policy against very expensive no-bid contracts for his old cronies; or require that the major sports teams' revenues pay for all the outrageously high costs of coaching staffs and facility renovations; or get rid of a few public relations people because there's no way that UNM public relations is going to improve as long as Schmidly is here; or because of money saved on any of the above, lift all the freezes on faculty and staff hiring and raises.

I commend the Daily Lobo for printing the news regardless of whose toes they step on and encourage them to keep doing it. In fact, the Daily Lobo has been less vigorous on this story than the Albuquerque Journal, which has been regularly publishing news, letters and commentaries about Schmidly and UNM, i.e., Feb. 24 front-page headline: "Foundation Won't Pay Schmidly." Another Journal front-page headline today is a column: "Can We Change CEO Behavior for Good?" which I recommend that Schmidly, David Harris, Jamie Koch, et al., read.

UNM is not a corporation for them to exploit at will. The comment that "Perhaps Schmidly's budget cuts hit a little too close to home for the Daily Lobo" is true. The administration took $50,000 from the Lobo's budget in its initial harvesting of funds - and had to return it later when they found out they could not do that. But I wouldn't automatically assume that is going to cause bias in the Lobo's news coverage. That it would is an undeserved low blow.

These are times that try people's souls, and we should all be working together to solve budget problems. But Schmidly doesn't really want to work with faculty or staff or anyone else who won't rubber-stamp everything he does.

Marjorie Crow

UNM staff