The California Aggie

UC Davis is not a school with a reputation for journalism. It shouldn't be expected to have a stellar student periodical. Yet it is slightly embarrassing that I myself am a better writer than most of the California Aggie's staff. And it's not just me. Guest editorials and letters to the editor consistently outshine the general staff's contributions.

Two Aggie columnists have something interesting to say and are more-or-less capable of articulating it. Michelle Rick works the sassy/clever approach for her column. Though the approach is deeply cliché and sometimes interferes with the actual content of her articles, she otherwise executes it well and, let's face it, it's a medium whose principle objective is to entertain rather than to inform. While I appreciate her talent, her flippancy and posed coolness have earned her one of my friends' undying hatred. Lior Gotesman on the other hand is a solid, if stereotypical, advocate of philosophy. He's hostile to thoughtless consumerism and passionate about the meaning of life. It would put me to sleep if it wasn't interestingly written.

The columnists have improved since last year to the point of consistent mediocrity (except columnist/editor-in-chief Richard Procter who is an excellent writer). There is no low hanging fruit for me to pounce on. The same cannot be said of the Aggie's editorial section.

Zach Han is the worst writer I have ever seen published. He generally chooses topics immediately after they have been beaten to death by mainstream media. He then manages to demonstrate misunderstanding of even TV news' terribly oversimplified explanations of current events. It's as if he took a fractured understanding of a Fox news report, applied some ill-conceived restructuring and then imposed some asinine moral summation he'd heard from a passerby. To add insult to injury, he goes out of his way to use big words and complex sentence structures beyond his apparent reach. The result is a series of syntactical and logical errors that confound the flow of his insipid conclusions. I am appalled by Zach Han's writing on so many levels that just thinking about it makes me see red.

In diametric opposition to Han is the finest Aggie writer I have come across, one James Noonan. There is no minority perspective so persecuted or valuable at a liberal university as the intelligent conservative's and James Noonan is living proof. He writes articulately and fearlessly, exposing hypocrisy and waste in our university and country. Noonan is no partisan hack, though. One of my favorite articles was his caustic assault on Bill O'Reilly.

Unfortunately, Noonan and Procter are in the stark minority at our campus paper. Most Aggie readers pick it up for the Sudoku rather than its bumbling calendar section, comic strips, articles, columns or commentary on world events. I find myself reading it more to mentally shred the writing than for information. Instead, I've taken to scrounging the faculty and staff's weekly periodical, Dateline UC Davis.

In contrast to the Aggie, Dateline UC Davis is interesting, competent, informative, coherently structured and unobtrusively written. It is especially good for finding seminars, guest lectures and Mondavi Center events. It also finds fascinating campus research to report and thoughtfully probes into campus trends and occurrences. By trying for less, Dateline is ultimately more useful to students than the paper the students directly fund.

Dateline is produced by the full-time UC Davis News Service, so its professionalism shouldn't be surprising. I just have trouble legitimizing the university staff having access to higher quality campus information than students. Furthermore, I have trouble understanding why the Aggie can't tap into the student potential that letters to the editor assure me exists.