Propaganda is not news

I was walking around campus on Friday with nothing to do between classes and I noticed some people were handing out flyers in front of Hughes-Trigg. I see people doing this all the time, but I always like to check and see what it is that's being passed around. Usually it's just some advertisement for a club or activity on campus. No big deal. As I walked past, some guy handed me a few sheets of paper stapled together that looked like a bunch of different articles pasted together. Now, at the time, I had no idea what this handout was about, but I later got a better idea as to what these flyers were. I'm sitting there on the quad, flipping through this thing and something just doesn't look quite right. There are facts on the pages, some being quite sketchy by the way, and it's presented in some sort of news format. The more I read, I figure out that it's some sort of Conservative group on campus trying to get their message across. Let me just say that I think that it's great if they want to walk around passing out their ideas to the masses of students that will probably ignore it anyway. That being said, what bothered me was what I later learned. Now I don't no if the information I received is 100 percent accurate, but from what I did hear, these flyers that were being handed out are an attempt to upstart a new paper on campus that competes with the Daily Campus. If that's true, that's actually not a bad idea. Competition is usually necessary for organizations or businesses to stay on top of things. What I don't like is propaganda being presented as news. Too often today, many journalists present statements as facts, when they're just more opinions that are spun into sounding like factual information. Fox News, need I say more. I'm not trying to pick on the right, because this does happen on the left as well. Regardless of who is doing this, it needs to stop. I love hearing people's opinions, especially when they disagree with me, but they need to be in an appropriate place. All I'm saying, is that you can say whatever you want, just call it what it is. I'm sure some on campus feel that the DC occasionally leans to the left, but I say that if it bugs you that much, go and work for them. Despite my own personal beliefs on certain issues, I think having varying opinions is probably the central most important thing we can do as a society. Diversity is not a bad thing.