To the Editor:
With Tuesday's front-page article "Eilertsen '99 leads on election eve," The Dartmouth once again demonstrated its insatiable appetite to exert influence over the leadership of the Dartmouth student body.
The response rate of 13.8 percent on the newspaper's poll rendered the study useless for any prognosis of election results, yet The Dartmouth considered it news. The poll was taken more than four days before the voting began, yet The Dartmouth advertised it as "election eve."
A collective letter was written to The Dartmouth, signed by all of the Student Assembly presidential and vice-presidential candidates on the ballot as well as write-in candidates Unai Montes-Irueste '98 and Nahoko Kawakyu '99, which argued that printing the results of the poll would be nothing less than abuse of The Dartmouth's monopoly and must not occur for the sake of ALL of the candidates, yet The Dartmouth ignored that collective voice and printed the results anyway.
Freedom of the press is held sacred in our country so that the news media can serve as a watchdog over the workings of societal institutions. When the news media abuses that right by attempting to exert control over those institutions, these abuses go largely unchecked. The Dartmouth's monopoly status gives it an even higher burden to self-regulate. A burden which, in this case, it has failed to meet.
The Dartmouth must remember that it's duty is to report the news, not to influence nor to create it. "Eilertsen '99 leads on election eve" did not accomplish the former, and clearly attempted the latter.
