News is coming at us from all angles today. On the docket are stories big and small, national and local, light-hearted and of a somber tone. We’re here to wade through it all for you. Enough with the preamble, let’s make sense of today’s news.
L.A. Times does some real muckraking
It seems that there’s an endless trail of unsettling news coming our way from Kabul. Only a few weeks after Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ murder of 16 innocent Afghan civilians, The Los Angeles Times revealed that it has photos of U.S. soldiers posing with mangled corpses of supposed Afghan suicide bombers. Of the 18 photos taken in February 2010, two were published in The Times this week.
Support for the U.S. cause in Afghanistan has been steadily waning for quite some time and after the publication of these gruesome photos, along with Bales’ rampage, it’s hard to say that support hasn’t undergone a full-fledged erosion. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other Pentagon officials peddled The Times to not publish the photos, which is only more troubling. The Times did right by the American public, putting on full display the frightening truths of the American effort in Afghanistan.
Let the commencement countdown commence
Mark your calendars, seniors. We’re no longer counting down to graduation by months, but by days. There is literally no time to waste. In fact, you’re wasting time by reading this editorial. There are roughly 720 hours until graduation. You’ve spent about four years here and we’re willing to bet you haven’t accomplished nearly everything you set out to when you were but a lowly, wide-eyed freshman ready to conquer the college world.
Go frolic in the Nature Preserve, enjoy wing night at the Belmar, go on a shopping spree at the Salvation Army, ride your bike through Otsiningo Park, cradle the ample scrotum of the Events Center bearcat statue, eat something off the floor of The Rat (because you only live once, and that life will end shortly after you eat something off the floor of The Rat — it would be a cool way to go out, right?).
Greek Life developments
Well, Binghamton is in the pages of The New York Times once again. Perhaps our most notable waltz onto the most reputable pages in the world since the 2009 basketball scandal, this go-around — obviously regarding hazing allegations and Greek Life shutdown — had a different feel. The basketball story was out-and-out bad publicity, a chronicle of our administration’s attempt to achieve good publicity through a successful Division I basketball team gone horribly awry.
Coverage this time around was about our administration’s move to create bad publicity, in the hopes of preventing even worse publicity. After all their copy about us in the past few years, it’s funny to see that The Times at least still considers us “one of the Northeast’s top public colleges.”