There’s this great line from a song that everyone sings at baseball games in America.

“Root, root, root for the home team. If they don’t win it’s a shame.”

Lots of people around campus think that it’s a shame whenever the Daily Cal bags on a team or the performance of an athlete here at Cal. Hypothetically, these people would say, “But you’re the school newspaper. You’re supposed to support our student-athletes.”

While we may root for the Bears in our hearts, we cannot explicitly root for Cal when we’re on the job.

First, we’re a student-run newspaper that happens to cover UC Berkeley and Cal athletics. Yes, we shorten the paper’s name to the Daily Cal, but we’re not the ones responsible for putting the athletic department’s teams and its athletes in a positive light. That’s Cal Media Relations’s job.

Second, we’re trying to train our writers to become objective journalists. While some student sports reporters are into the whole rah-rah approach and wearing their school’s officially licensed apparel to games, we have our writers cover a game with the utmost objectivity. That means you won’t see our reporters sporting the Cal script, chanting along with Rally Comm or singing along with the Cal Band while they’re on the job.

In terms of reporting, yes, we focus on the Bears. However, we try to present information in a way that does not show bias–we’re going to write whatever we see as is. So if Ryan Anderson’s five three-pointers really did spark the Cal men’s hoops team to a win, then that’s what we’re going to write. If Nate Longshore’s interception led to a loss for the Bears, then that’s what we’re going to say.

You also won’t see is the Daily Cal refer to Cal or the Bears as ‘us’ and ‘we’ in our stories. But as I eluded to before, that doesn’t mean we have any disdain for Cal. We want the Bears to win. We want them to do well. We want the best for our university.

However, we still strive to objectively report on what we see. We may still root, root, root for the home team, but if they don’t win, it’s not a shame in tomorrow’s recap.

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