The Rant & Rage: Taking it in the Rearguard

In its March edition, Portland State’s student publication the Rearguard printed a piece on the “Vanguard’s dirty little secret” titled “Everyone’s a critic: The Vanguard takes heat for silencing dissent.” Well that sounds controversial!

And it was—that is, at least it was when the Rearguard artificially created it.

Quite a few accusations and insinuations were made. I can’t, however, find one that is remotely true.

Don’t mess with the bull—and thus here we go.

The article attempted to explain the Vanguard‘s recent hacking incident last January. It was implied that this could have been some sort of conspiracy. What actually happened was that College Publisher, the Web host for the Vanguard, got hacked, resulting in much of its online material being lost. Later, some articles were able to be reposted, though without the previous comments attached to them. As this “conspiracy” nefariously grew bigger, they claim that our online editor was “actively rejecting comments.”

You’re damn straight our online editor rejects comments. As if that is something controversial or a dirty little secret. You know how much crap gets submitted?!

In general, offensive comments that the Vanguard would reject are more geared toward, for example, racist or anti-Semitic notions. This is nothing new. And hey, the Rearguard might feel fine promoting homophobic rhetoric in their paper, but it’s not something that contributes to discourse in the end. Which is another online policy, along with not publishing advertisements or threats. The “official” policy reported in the story was therefore inaccurate. Comments such as “you guys suck” usually get through just fine.

Anyone who looks through any of the Vanguard‘s online articles can tell pretty quickly that there hasn’t been censoring of anyone’s criticism. Trying to make it appear as if a Big Brother is running the publication is a little off. Hell, the Rant and Rage receives regular disparagement.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of the article is at the end, when the Rearguard revels in self-admiration, flaunting a tolerance of dissent that their sister publications don’t have. Was this all manufactured drama just to make yourselves look good?

It can be a blow when you find out something you’ve published is, well, full of crap. So I offer my sympathies to the Rearguard. Why don’t I throw out a tip to help those in similar situations: Do some reporting. For the Rearguard, this would have been rather simple—step outside your office door and take five steps to the left (I counted).

By doing so they could have gotten answers and other material for their “news” story—some people like to call them facts—such as an accurate policy to quote, or the details of what actually happened with the hacking incident.

You can also take those steps to let your sister publication across the hall know that they have more people hacking into their system! Especially when you know how they are doing it.

And did anyone else wonder why the hell they blurred out the user name of the person who actually changed the statuses on the so-called evidence or screen shots? Not that it matters if he ever did accept or reject anything, but they already named Online Editor Zach Chastaine in the article, so why blur out his name if he really did make these changes?

Furthermore, to imply that the Rearguard has enough nerdy might and sway to operate an organization such as a Bothan spy network is laughable. They are more apt to act as Dominion spies going through withdrawal from Ketracel White—nothing pisses off Star Wars geeks like a good Trek reference.