Is the Daily violating NCAA rules with this ad?

Knowing the people I worked with and our editorial slants at the time, I think "Rage Against the Soundgarden" might be a more apt description. I remember a heavy discussion once when we were getting down on ourselves for having a relatively homogenous group (predominantly white, lots of us Jews, mostly from relatively upper middle class backgrounds, either from New York or the Detroit Suburbs). We talked about ways to change that, and how it was likely affecting our message. I wanted us to start traveling to schools across Michigan and talking to their newspaper staffs, having a presence at MIPA (more than a table at least), etc.

I know our reputation was "those liberals" and a number of other epithets, and that some of it was deserved, but that most of it was your run-of-the-mill grumbling from the right about media bias. There were a couple of anti-Daily newspapers at the time, and I remember them both ripping into us for putting some diag "protest" concerning Affirmative Action on the front page. Neither ever mentioned my article in the same issue about the historical residue of the early- and mid-20th century USDA's racist policies against black farmers in Michigan, and how a coalition of Detroit suburbanites and black farmers in Washtenaw, Jackson and Calhoun Counties were starting a program of target-marketing commodities from goods produced by Michigan's African-American farmers to Detroiters. My point: most of the Daily's material was good stuff, but the reputations and battles were always fought over the same tangental 1-percent shit.

Mostly I wrote editorial, where the real bias was apparent (because it's opinion). I remember fighting a constant battle to convince people that the unsigned editorial section was not news, but just the ed board's lightly researched opinion, based strongly in precedent. The news guys were not allowed in the ed board room, except to present their fact-finding and then leave before any discussion took place.

As to the fringe groups, I was there right after Jessica Curtain (who apparently had more eligibility than Tacopants) stormed our building with her army of Communists (yes, they were honest-to-God commies) and that she and her ilk were a joke to us.

Editorially we called for President Clinton's resignation during the Lewinsky affair (I was against that), stood very steadfast behind affirmative action during the lawsuits, supported the rights of the Michigan Nazis and the photos-of-abortion diag events to be held in public while criticizing their taste. We had some of our best work, I thought, in the days after 9-11, and I credit Mike Grass for calming everyone down when the Ed Board met late that evening and half the room wanted to bomb the hell out of everyone who ever wronged the U.S. On Sept. 12 we published an editorial about American unity and that it would be important for our solidarity to not be confused with jingoism (in retrospect, a much more apropos and meaningful response than most papers' "loss of American innocence" take), and we got a lot of letters criticizing us for not advocating the bombing to hell of anyone who had ever wronged the U.S. So it went.