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The student staffers at the Oregon Daily Emerald have ended their strike after winning three of their four demands. They will be entering into mediation with their board of directors next week to resolve the remaining issues.
As the Emerald staff noted on their blog, thirty-three student newspapers across the nation have published a joint editorial in solidarity with the strikers.
A fake news story claiming that herpes was being transmitted via beer pong on college campuses migrated from a student newspaper to a national student news service to local television to Fox News before coming to rest on the Colbert Report last night.
On February 11, the Ohio State University Lantern ran an article speculating that playing beer pong could transmit mononucleosis and herpes. That piece was picked up by the national campus media service UWire, inspiring similar stories at other campus papers. One of those stories, an article in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, added the false claim that the Centers for Disease Control consider “unprotected beer pong play … nearly as dangerous as unprotected sex.”
It was at about this time that the story made the leap from campus newspapers to local TV news, who — like the Daily Collegian — integrated “facts” from a humor article posted last July at BannedInHollywood.com, into their reporting. KNBC in Los Angeles not only passed on the claim that the president of Arizona State University is distributing germ-free beer pong cups in ASU’s dorms, it reprinted Banned In Hollywood’s fake CDC list of “safe pong” tips. Another station led with the tagline “it’s all fun and games until someone gets herpes.”
From local television, it was a short leap to Fox News, whose morning show Fox and Friends ran a segment in which the show’s anchors discussed the dangers of beer pong while playing beer pong with a doctor in a minidress, as can be seen in the Colbert Report clip.
“One of the many upsetting aspects to being in your forties, is hearing people your own age grumbling about “young people” the way we were grumbled about ourselves.”
That’s how British comedian and activist Mark Steel begins his op-ed column on the current wave of British student protest and the dismissive attitude that many people his age take toward the youth of today. It’s a smart, funny piece, and worth a read.
The folks behind the Take Back NYU protests have come in for a lot of abuse in the last week, and though some of it has been on-target, quite a bit has fallen wide of the mark. I’ll be posting my own take on the occupation itself soon, but before I do that I want to explore a few of the critics’ more telling errors and misstatements.
“I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”
–WEB DuBois, whose 141st birthday was yesterday.
studentactivism.net 
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