Nathan Tailleur on the troubling dark underside of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show.

So, another semester comes to an end. I’ve only got one left now. I feel I had more when I started. Four years, that’s a lot of time. Eight semesters, that sounds like even more. We all throw a couple away. Count your time in pong cups you’ve crushed, it seems like a lot longer. Count it in Govt’ Mule concerts you’ve been to, turns out you’re not here for very long (if at all). Count your time in Ithaca High kids you saw smoking pot at that concert and you’ll think you’re here forever.

The Sun has spilled much ink on the Student Assembly’s decision to reduce Cornell Cinema’s part of the Student Activity Fee and the subsequent affirmation of that decision on appeal. The issue has ruffled feathers, and I want to give readers my idea of how it all played out.

The strongest aspect of the coverage is that after reporting the story, The Sun’s pages served as a forum for people on both sides of the issue to be heard. The weakest, however, is that the news coverage — and even some of The Sun’s own editorial product — was somewhat underreported, missing important facts that could have provided better context.

Pop quiz: What do Glenn Beck and Bill Maher have in common? If you answered with, “They’re both blowhards” ... well, sure. But for the purposes of the present conversation, let’s take a look at these two from another angle. What other similarities might they bear? Well, for starters, they both host news-centered cable television programs. More to the point, they’re both famous for their “colorful” approaches to political commentary. And, most recently, they’ve both urged Americans to reject the new swine flu vaccine.

A front-page, above-the-fold story in the Sep. 21 issue of The Sun, “Undergrads May Teach FWS to Reduce Cost,” caused some distress; it turned out to be wrong. When a front-page story is not correct, a comprehensive look is worth the effort. A few factors were at play here, and The Sun has since taken steps to do right by its sources and its readers.

Taken at its face, the story seemed like a real scoop. With a foundering endowment and a call for spending cuts, departments across Cornell are making difficult decisions on a tighter budget; hypothetically, having undergraduates teach First-Year Writing Seminars might help reduce costs. It might also alleviate problems associated with a growing undergraduate population but a declining number of graduate students.

The proper boundaries in the relationship between reporter and source can be fuzzy, as two Sun pieces from the past few weeks help illustrate. Instances like these raise important questions for any newspaper.

One recent example was the April 6 story “Like National Trend, Ithaca’s Dailies Face Tough Times,” by Dani Neuharth-Keusch ’12. The story had quotes from Ken Paulson, formerly the top editor at USA Today; Tara Connell, a vice president of the major media company Gannett, which owns USA Today; and Jack Marsh, vice president of The Freedom Forum, which advocates for freedom of speech and the press.

You would think that being selected as a New York Times columnist would spur you to churn out some of the highest-quality prose you could muster. It was surprising, then, when Bill Kristol, founder of the Weekly Standard and scion of the right-wing punditocracy, blessed the Gray Lady’s Op-Ed pages with possibly the worst writing it’d ever seen. Kristol, no stranger to the argumentative essay or the persuasive piece, regularly gave his name to columns that were shoddily structured, shabbily researched and just plain boring; it seemed at times as if the veteran polemicist were doing little more than filtering propaganda into the backside of the front section.