University Daily Kansan
Friday, March 5, 1971
3
KANSAN comment
Election Party Blues
The Hawklet in Summerfield was crowded with students. Cheers mixed with laughs greeted members of the Senate elections committee as they brought in the totals for the class officers. After they were posted everyone resumed what they had been doing before the interruption-talking, playing cards and just sitting.
Suddenly a rumble rose through the crowd. John Friedman, chairman of the elections committee, walked into the Hawklet with another list to be posted—but this list was longer.
"Miller . . . Miller's won," the whisper started and a shout went up when Friedman posted the results. Dave Miller, the winner and only presidential candidate who was there, looked stunned.
It was now the beryllic hours of the morning and the computer has broken down. They are counting the number for Student Senate seats by hand.
This is a problem that needs to be solved. The election results, which will not be completed until this afternoon, will not be published until after spring break. Backdowns in
the counting process are to be expected. Perhaps next year the elections won't be so close to spring break.
Miller got 1.005 votes—less than six per cent of the enrolled students and 22 per cent of the vote. The low vote is hard to control (it is, however, higher than at Colorado where only about 1000 voted this year), but something could be done about the low percentage.
Run-off elections of the top two candidates would eliminate this.
It is too early to say what this election will mean to the University. A lot of that depends on how the newly-elected senators react to being senators. Will apathy again damp and will quorum be elusive?
Students should follow the Senate closely this year and communicate with their senators. The lines of communication must remain open in the emphasis of the election party in the Hawkiet must not fall off.
-Galen Bland Editor
Wrong Association
LETTERS
To the editor:
We, members of Phi Gamma Delta, are concerned about a recent letter to the University of Pennsylvania concerning the Campus Improvement Association (C.I.A.) and the fraternity Phi Gamma Delta. We are more concerned by the smoking of marijuana. This conclusion is entirely incorrect. It is true that Phi Gamma Delta has some common concerns and common interests, among which are the helping of ad-hoc drug users and drugs. It is definitely not true, however, that the relationship between the two groups is important in Phi Gamma Delta or any other illegal drugs.
We would like to point out that both the C.I.A. and the Cam fraternity have universities that have formed by the Kansas University Student Housing Association and the latter voluntary association with the fraternity Council (I.F.C.). Both groups are based on the ideal of brothership and alliances, and it is here that our relationship is strongest.
The letter also states that, "We must seek a common defense and emerging systems of value. We are in agreement with this statement but do not feel that the Miller Veneral reacts on the editorialize on the legality or morality of Attorney General Miller Veneral's recent raids on the police. We do, however, wonder if Attorney General Miller actually have the best of minds and state in mind when he
undertook this action, or if he was more interested in fur- ercareer at the expense of the Lawrence community. We would be interested in hearing an explanation by Attorney General to why the raids were made and what he expected to ac-
Jim McMurtry,
Leawood junior
Pirk Ark.
President, Phi Gamma Delta
and Mission Jupiter
Letters Policy
Kunyam Staff Photo by GREG SORBER
Letters to the editor should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. All letters are subject to editing and condensation, according to space limitations and the editor's judgment. Students must be familiar with the town name, town city, faculty and staff must provide their name and position; others must provide their name and address.
Frank Morgan Jr., KU Editor-in-Residence
returns to Kansan newsroom
A Native Son Returns
By FRANK MORGAN JR
NEW FORM MORGANSON. (Editor's Note) The author of the following is a former editor and graduate in 1961 and this week returned to KU for the first time, to serve as editor-in-residence at the School of Journalism for three years. During his has been a reporter with UPL the Wall Street Journal and currently is bureau chief of Newsweek Magazine in Boston.)
You can go home again, Tom Wolfe, you really can
Ten years ago today I was in the same newsroom, probably at the same typewriter, writing for the same Daily Kanan. Then, it became clear that he did not "immature and gratuitous" SEX in salks urging them to sign up for the month-old Peace Corps ("the silent generation finally paid its respect to the infant John Birch Society for laying siege to kru prof who probably had proposed admitting China to the U.N. (Incidentally, the kru prof was a student of the Opinion") is old Scott Stanley, president of Young Americans for Freedom at KU in Chicago, who was quilting with Gaucerelle W. Clarke in his room. The director of the University, attacking Lawrence barbers for not serving Negro students ("Negro" was written by Charles DeGaleau on the Algernon novel Jack Kennedy on the Bay of Pigs, and lauding coach Jack Mitchell as a "hella nice guy" only editorial that embraces me in
Returning this week I've found everything has changed, and nothing has changed. The faces are the same, exactly the same open, but the hair is more brown than blue. 'Hey, weren't you Dick Crocker?' I almost asked one lanky, shuffle-gaited hairstair at my desk. The hair is longer, but more early-heleen (in a Taylor style I expected to do). Dope has replaced bourbon, but we at least could spell "Florida" as politician whose ads read "E. Pluribus (Canada) Sweat Movement of my day has been replaced by Women's Jib. (I'm with you in the middle of thinking of Betty Friedan as a sex object.)
I stand on Jayhawk Boulevard and watch
an International Day of Parks—with
But my view is, admittedly, lauded. I'm an alien, a card-carrying member of the radical middle (nee Silent) generation, a teenager who is largely numerous times in the past few days.
balloons and good-natured chants, yet—march past a bed-basket banner proclaiming KU No. 1 basketball I overhear one student探他 is an hepazored about the drug raid, is thinking about it, but can't make the protest rally happen. The student government candidates are making cosmic and impossible promises, as in my day, and the Kanasan, as then, they don't vote. Everyone doesn't vote. I understand a movement underway to have a Spring Festival on Jayhawk Boulevard with street dancing, cart races and beer. And there even been the notion of a possibly paniy road, which image would cause coronaries in half the
"I understand you wrote a lot of right-wing stuff when you were here," says a former Kanssen editor, trying to strike up a friendly conversation. Me, right-wing? I'm the one who helped integrate Louise's Bar. After getting the night of the bust I couldn't understand why my black classmates would ever want to drink at Louise's, then a dingy hard-hatville. Her change has changed considerably. I've always been addressed as "sir" by potential beer-drinking women and who look older than my wife (whom I still occasionally refer to as "Janie Schiltemhardt, St. Francis a haibt pie on up Daily Kansas days."
My view is colored too by the fact that I may also an alien from that foreign land bordered on the west by the Hudson and Connecticut on the east by the Eastern Establishment country I was beginning to believe the myth that all campuses were Harvard or Berkeley—a myth, I confess, that the press and Newsewweek-Boston contributed very pages in the little Red Book, Brother Mao.
As a Gallup poll in Newsweek two weeks ago said, "All Podiums are Harvard," and, "We don't need them." But neither a Podium nor a Harvard. I hope KU realizes it's complimentary to say it is no
Miller Raid Brings Fire from Editors
Last Friday morning, in the din of a boardroom, Vern Miller said, *student who is a good citizen should have an adversary reaction.*
Some of the students did have an adverse reaction but it is interesting to hear what the editors of articles around the state are writing.
From Miller's hometown, the Wichita Eagle said:
When he was running for office he said he was going to 'land both feet' on the Lawrence "hipbones" immunity, and he did certainly do it.
He took 150 lawmen recruited from all around Kansas and moved in at 2:30 a.m. on KU. When he was through he had 50 persons. That averages to someone like five enforcement agents at a time.
Not many Kansans are opposed to the general idea of trying to stop traffic. But it's the real problem, perched with. And a raid such as Friday's, which was so generally unfriendly, had had been talking about it for days, looks a little more like a stunt caint than anything else.
The Iola Register questioned the drug traffic in Wichita where Miller was sheeriff. Wichita, a city with an acknowledged center of the illegal drug business in the state. Why, one wonders, didn't he make his case against him? Because he couldn't hope for the same publicity from raids in the ghetto areas of Wichita that he and on the KU campus.
The Coffeyville Tribute wonders whether KU officials should be contacted before the raids. Miller says KU officials of the raid last week "because it was none of their business."
That's a switch. Not long ago, KU's chancellor was told that everything that goes on at or near the campus was his responsibility. None other than Henry Dugard,副教長, advised Larry Cherry that he was responsible for the whole shootin match.
Larry Chalmers must feel easier now. Mr. Miller has
(Or be prepared for a raid by 150 volunteers, 10 newsmen and three television camera crews.
relied him on responsiveness, too such things as what goes on in dormitories. "It's 'none of their business.'" And when our at-arm secretary says its none of your business, "you better believe it."
The El Dorado Times spoke of the attorney general's methods and motives. It is evident that Mr. Miller, a lawyer who thinks the office of attorney general under his direction is likely to be a place where senators work, will nature frequently take place. Miller is not one to burble his zeal for action. He wants to smash and break down the law to be the center of attention. He will with him his own set of reporters and photographers. In almost every news photo of the raid he wrote about, the El Dorado Miller was the central figure.
The Manhattan Mercury also had criticism: It was glory-seeking and harassment, pure evil. The delegation is reminiscent of Nazi Germany. The temptation, we suppose, is to laugh this one off as a Barney toy, affair with an overly feminine captain mastering his expeditionary forces
But somehow we can't laugh when we think that the Attorney could have made appropriate arrests at a less spectacular time of day, considering the fact he has been used anytime.
We can't laugh about the fact that, as far as we have been able to learn, in none of the raids he discover any hard drugs.
And our sense of humor runs completely out at the point of publication, but Miller secretly heralded trusted members of the news media about his intentions but didn't admit them. In one chancellor, a party who it must be presumed, have should have knowledge about such affairs.
Perhaps some of the "hud citizen" students at KU were outraged no less than some of the "hud citizen" editors throughout the country, regardless of their intelligence, the attorney general will never make it a prognosticator.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
All-American college newspaper
Kansan Telephone Numbers
Newsroom—UN 4-4810
Business Office—UN 4-4328
Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except毕业 and examination period. Mail subscription rates: $5 a semester. $10 a year. For enrolment, please visit www.unk.edu/careers/undergraduate-services/services and employment offered to all students without prior credit. Opinions expressed are not necessarily indicative of the University of Kansas.
NEWS STAFF
NEWS STAFF
News Adviser . . . Del Brinkmar
News Adviser .. Del Brinkman
Galen Bland
BUSINESS STAFF
Business Adviser . . Mel Adams
Figures Mislead in Reporting of Economic Stories
David Haek
By FRANK SLOVER Kansan Staff Writer
"The strike was settled with the workers receiving a 45 per cent raise in pay and another 10 per cent in fringe benefits."
What makes that meat?
About as much as: "The price level took an upswelling last month, the highest in the past two years."
... The adjusted level, however,
showed no change over the
previous month."
Both statements mean little to the man who reads them and they probably mean little to the journalist who writes them. They are statements couched in the past or the future, by only those who do not need to rely on the press to supply their economic information.
Joseph Pichler, associate professor of business, has criticized the press for its (mis)handling of economic facts and reported that the reporting is useless; at worst, it is actually misleading.
HE EXCLUDED specialized financial journals and the financial sections of newspapers from his criticisms, not because he was a superior but because their readers can be assumed to be more interested in and informed about economic and financial issues. It is the everyday sort of economic story that raises hisire.
He is especially critical of labor reporting and said he thought the reporting of strikes did nothing to inform the public about labor abuse. He has criticized earlier recently worked in the federal government in Washington.
"Newsapers," he said, tend to report a strike in terms of its cost. The story will point out that the workers have been out for a week and that many were offered so much when they went on strike and made some fractional gain after the three weeks or however long the strike lasted. So it seems that the fractional gain and the loss of wages due to the strike and come
to the conclusion that it will take the workers 49 years to earn back the money they have lost.
"Among other things, this approach neglects the time shift in production. Management managers take notice that employees overtime, at time-and-a-half or double-time, to build its inventories and after the strike the same thing occurs as the worker replenishes their supplies.
"THIS IS JUST a displacement of time and the workers don't lose as much as news stories say they do.
"Also, some men take their vacations during the strike, further mitigating the loss."
Pichler also noted that this sort of reporting neglects the impact on students, and the possibility that a hard line in one strike will mean easier negotiations with more fruitful bargaining to next round of bargaining talks.
And when the strike is finally settled, the front page presents such spectacular告 as "the $3 per hour raise over a three and a half year period is a 42 per cent increase over the previous along with 24 cents an hour for burgery benefit increases."
A battling reporter could make the difference in the story. Indeed it was but the impression given was one of a foolish and an ambitious that many want to do quickie math as they read their morning papers. All
Forty-two per cent sounds like a gigantic increase. It is. The increase is spread over three and a half years—an increase of 12 per cent.
does the figure mean? Where comes from come from it. If comes from it, then negotiators will make it sound as extravagant as possible to boost confidence.
No matter where it comes from, the value of fringe benefits, or any other future payments, are hard to calculate. How can we on a pension plan, whose streams for another 20 years? In such cases as this, it is necessary to take the interest rate into account what the money would earn, if it were the payments start. This is a concept known as "discounting to present value" and gives trouble to businessmen; the news reader sort of information implicitly.
THE NEWS SHOULD not include figures like the "24 cents an hour for breeze benefits." What
Management has a different method of computation.
If the fringe benefit figure represents only an increase in funds paid by the firm to various plans, this should be stated along with the amount of money who holds and invests the funds. Recently, President Nixon suspended the Davis-Bacon Act which required that the government pay the going rate for benefits according to Pichler, the reporting of this situation was fine, as far as it went.
"THERE ARE GREAT implications here concerning apprenticeship," Pichler said, "that the press never mentioned.
"With the Davis-Bacon Act,
the only way apprentices can be paid at the apprentice rate is if the construction company has a apprenticeship program. Other education must be paid the journeyman rate."
"This puts non-union firms, which have not been able to get board membership to the riparian board (management erment), at a disadvantage. Now, a firm with a non-registered company is able to compete on government bids."
And speaking of labor, what
had happened at the Taft-
Harvard Club at 14 a.m.
14b is a labor issue; and labor
are always insisting on
their rights.
"Since many black firms are non-unionized, this decision can have quite an impact."
14th gives the states the right to legislate against the union shop—where a man must join a union, if he is unionized, after he gets the job.
On one hand, the labor leaders say that any man who takes advantage of the union who pays for bargaining power should pay for it. The union must fight the union shop--usually management--maintain that no man should be forced to join a collective association against his union won't accept him, then he has been denied the right to work.
What is it? Many readers know it and some know it to have do with the closed shop and the right to sell. Is it really important exactly what it issuer may say?
Pichler said the press gets bogged down in this area because its representatives did not know the law.
It has nothing to do with the closed shop. The closed shop—where a man must be a union member—will not pay job- bills is illegal by a federal statute.
PICHER MEETS this last period by mention that a section of the book he wrote states that a man cannot be demoted a job because he is in danger.
The union does not have to accept him, unless some sort of civil rights is involved, and he cannot not have him fired for that reason.
The situation is different in each state, because it is up to the board to make the decision. Some have shop clauses; others have shop clause is allowed to be written into collective bargaining agreements. In others, the union agrees to pay wages. In these there is a provision for the nonmembers to pay due to the union for services, such as cleaning, without joining the union.
Indiana passed a right-to-work law and then repealed it. Kansas made its right-to-work legislation the state's first amendment to the constitution.
"R is a super-law," Pichler said, "but there is no penalty for transgression."
It is popularly accepted now that the 14th issue has become a symbol of the symbiotic times of stress and shouted during election campaigns. The most recent research which indicated a labor organization has not been greatly affected by the presence of right-to-work legislation.
THE NATIONAL DERT is another institution which has been badly abused by the press. Pichler recalled some local news treatment of the debt which computed that every man, and not only American, in the United States is in debt to the time of some ridiculous figure.
In most of their reporting of the national debt, newspapers fall back on a household model that expects people to with all this debt. I could "177". The report goes on to shame those who would be facially irresponsible enough to leave such a child in children and grandchildren
What is ignored is the fact that a great portion of the debt is owed by America to itself and that it is better to have the debt and not than no debt and no production and no spending policies of a government leaves a debt to be repaid it also leaves physical production to be used and enjoyed. (Perhaps the best way to understand the reason that no debt existed and envisions the actual physical production.)
In the past few years, changes in the price level have received major play in the news. What cost-of-living index measure?
Theoretically it gauges the average rise in prices for the average city in the average city. To do this it arranges a
representative basket of goods and notes the changing prices of the items in that basket and the rise or fall (or fall) in the cost of living.
IT IS ASKED to do an imple-
mentation that its perhaps as good an indication is attainable. There are some things about it that the reader should know.
Pichier gave the example of the stainless steel razor blade.
First that it applies to the average family. Second, that you can compute. Third, that you compute. Quality changes, for example, are almost impossible.
"When the stainless steel blade, was introduced, it was more expensive than the blade it made. "When you move into the index," he said. "But the stainless blade is of higher quality. It can be used, say, three times as long as its predecessor. And much more difficult to compile."
How can the quality of a 1971 automobile, with its new air-conditioning and pollution control compared to a 1970 model?"
The adjusted figure, adjusted or seasonal variations, is the important one, but it is often less significant in story, almost as an afterthought.
Pichler recalled reading the *Washington Post* for a time last year and noting that the price of the story was beginning of the story and in the headline, but that it seemed unadjusted or adjusted by the unadjusted or adjusted figure.
"All they have to do is ask," he aid.
THE SEASONAL adjustment carries over into the area of reporting unemployment. It is simple unrealistic to compare the
Pichler said he thought that perhaps the journalists were not trained in science and was noted and cited the Bureau of Labor Statistics is always most cooperative in sending "masses of information" on such matters.
month when universities empty their graduates and summer job seekers on the market with a job offer. The employment circumstances.
"I'd get every man to hire his housework," Roger said. "The would all pay the same wages and everything worked." He added, "almost anything."
Vermont, Royster, former editor of the Wall Street Journal, speaking at the William Allen White Day ceremonies at the University of Kansas, gave his talk for greatly increasing the GNP.
The unemployment figure itself is its pitfalls. It does not count those who are willing to work and were convenient but do not apply for aid or otherwise get their jobs. The unemployed it has trouble encompassing those looking for moonlighting—jobs as employee or registered as a job.
Pichler defended the concept of agriculture such as the GNP as an indicator of success, in case the money value of the economy produced in the economy
However, he said he did not think it meant anything to most people. It is a method of action, and any method there are loopholes.
Another figure that does not mean much to most people but one that seems to have a great influence on the industrial average. It is, perhaps, an indication of chip stockings but has little to do with the bulk of the economy.
"Why use a correlate, when you can have the real thing?" Pichler asked.
The average price change per share is sometimes given but
SINCE THE STOCK figures all pass through a computer before they reach the news page, anyhow, it should be a small task to present a weighted average of the stocks on the exchange, he said.
does not carry the weight of the Dow-Jones figure.
There is nothing wrong with figures as measurements of angles, but what happens is nothing wrong with numbers; these figures to an audience that does not understand them and may misinterpret their meanings. It is cushionful that this philosophy of reporting will address the audiences, on either side of the ideological gap.
There are some measures that the press could take to improve the situation, according to Pichler.
1. Journalism schools should have a basic course in economics or in econometrics. The owest level course is necessary just to read economic news.
2. Newspapers could follow the example set by other corporations and businesses experts to promote an on aide economic program.
3. Newspapers have the opportunity, if not the obligation, to educate their readers. To achieve this, they could run a series on financial topics and then bind it and sell it cheaply to those who might have missed the feature the first time around. This economic reader would render a service if it just defined financial topics and avoided any discussion.
Any change may meet with resistance. Readers have been given a small sort of economic "facts" for some years, possibly have to come expect a certain treatment of news about strikes, the GNP or the cost of war; but when they change, they have been writing those "facts" the same way for a long time and they see the same sort of reporting everywhere they look.
It may be more comforting to read a vapid report over the morning's second cup than to come to grips with a story that will cause all illusions. The press, however, is in the illusion business. It is supposed to report and interpret facts.