Painting a Clear and Full Picture Through Opinion and the News

The Sun has spilled much ink on the Student Assembly’s decision to reduce Cornell Cinema’s part of the Student Activity Fee and the subsequent affirmation of that decision on appeal. The issue has ruffled feathers, and I want to give readers my idea of how it all played out.

The strongest aspect of the coverage is that after reporting the story, The Sun’s pages served as a forum for people on both sides of the issue to be heard. The weakest, however, is that the news coverage — and even some of The Sun’s own editorial product — was somewhat underreported, missing important facts that could have provided better context.

Starting with the strength, I am pleased that The Sun gave voice to the parties involved in this story. The paper printed letters to the editor from S.A. leaders Rammy Salem ’10 and Vincent Andrews ’11, and from Mary Fessenden, the director of Cornell Cinema. Allowing major players in a news event to speak out encourages dialogue and helps elucidate controversy in a way that news reporting alone cannot always do.

There was, however, a notable omission from the news reporting: attendance figures. Reading everything that The Sun has printed on the topic, news and editorial, I get very little objective sense of how popular Cornell Cinema shows are. It is intuitive that a blockbuster movie late in the week or on weekends would attract more of a gate than an art-house or esoteric flick, but even this is only hinted at.

The quote from Elaina Mule ’10 in the Oct. 29 story, “S.A. Considers Slashing Cinema Budget,” barely touches on this point, and it is buried at the bottom of the story. Mule said that some films do not have more than 10 people show up.

The best figure a reader could get on the topic came from columnist Andrew Daines ’10 in his Oct. 4 column: “[T]he median attendance for a single screening last year was in the mid-30s.” But Daines doesn’t make clear where he got this information. Granted, he doesn’t have to do so in a column, but this should have been reported in the news section.

The omission is critical because it leaves open the possibility that the cinema is not drawing enough people to justify keeping funding at past levels. I don’t contend that this possibility is true, but a reasonable reader probably would not know this by reading the news coverage. The Sun editorial section has printed an opinion by its own current and former editors (“In Defense of Our Cinema,” Nov. 2) trumpeting Cornell Cinema as a paragon of culture being unfairly cut down by “overly zealous budget hawks.”

But I would argue that the popularity of the cinema is incompletely supported by facts in the news section. Although 40-plus people attended the S.A. meeting on the appeal of the funding cuts (questionably described as an “en masse” turnout in an unsigned Nov. 2 editorial), even that number is not properly contextualized.

Fessenden said that 30,000 people attended Cornell Cinema last year, as quoted in the Oct. 30 story, “S.A. Upholds Decision to Slash Cinema’s Funding.” But one number by an interested party simply does not give enough context to gauge the popularity of the cinema. Maybe 30,000 people could be considered “poor attendance,” considering the size of the campus community.

A better way to frame the argument might be this: If a movie plays at Cornell Cinema and no one comes to watch, then is it really culture? Is it really benefiting anyone? These questions are unanswered.

The editorial position of The Sun on the issue cannot possibly be in doubt after the past two weeks of coverage. The unsigned Nov. 2 editorial and the same-day opinion piece signed by multiple Sun editors, past and present, attacked the S.A. for its decision, using strong rhetoric and showing generally good reporting.

The “In Defense of Our Cinema” piece was reported and written primarily by Peter Finocchario ’10 and Ted Hamilton ’10, former and current Arts and Entertainment Editors. They did a fine job laying out their argument and presenting what they had reported to make their point. Looking at the piece from a macro level, however, I question the wisdom of using Sun resources to do reporting in order to augment an opinion, when the news coverage was incomplete.

While I believe the facts presented in the “In Defense of Our Cinema” opinion are well-reported and do not merit any sort of correction, the coverage of the funding cuts proves that avoiding omissions can be just as important as printing correct facts.

Rob Tricchinelli is a second-year student in the Law School and also holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. He can be reached at public-editor@cornellsun.com [7]. The public editor column appears alternate Mondays this semester.