Kim Manahan

By Kim Manahan, Editor

Like editors before me, I could write the typical first issue editorial about how excited I am for this semester, and all of these other positive things.

But I would be lying. And lying in journalism would be unethical.

Falsifying the news is perhaps the gravest sin in journalism. It gives the public the wrong perspective and hides information that could be pertinent to a certain subject.

This also includes news that only tells one side of the story.

Over the past couple of years, I learned that every story has more than one side. Whether it is coverage of the war overseas, debates between friends, or those mirrors in the College Center, there’s more to things than meet the eye.

Sometimes this concept may be hard to grasp.

You want to believe that something is true, but it really is not. All of your morals can rest on this one thing being the truth – and then another side or perspective on it arises.

The late journalist Hunter S. Thompson once said, “I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.”

I can’t imagine argument against that.

We can take that a step further and say that it’s always between 9 to 5 somewhere.

In a sense, the world as we know it is just one giant lie.

I only say this because we can’t be everywhere at once, and when a story comes around about what happened where we weren’t, it’s bound not to have all of the sides.

Now that we’re on the topic of truth, I’ll incorporate the usual first issue, editor stuff into this piece.

We have the largest staff – about a dozen – working for the Whetstone this spring than anytime during the four years I’ve been working at the paper.

Sadly, though, nothing serious seems to have happened on campus in the past month, so there’s nothing really controversial in this issue.

It’s somewhat nerve-wracking to hold up this newspaper to what everyone seems to expect from it.

I can’t guarantee that someone will steal the president’s license plate or that there are some secret extra finances tucked away somewhere.

But there is one thing I can guarantee. It will be the truth.

The news will be nothing but the truth, from all sides that will give us their story.