David Broder's recent column excusing Dan Rather's unprofessionalism in the Killian memogate scandal got me to asking myself what sort of standards I held myself to in the handful of articles I wrote for my college newspaper at USF. One in particular was a detailed, point-by-point review of an abortion debate. One of my professors took the anti-abortion side, one from UC Berkeley took the other side.

The debate was at least an hour, so the article was pretty long and took a long time to write. I had taken pretty good notes scoring the debate, and I was quite familiar with the arguments of both sides. I thought I was being fair when I gave all but one of the roughly 20 points to the anti- side, and one for the "choicer". In short, it was a complete rout of the pro-choice arguments presented that evening, and I said so in the article. What was interesting (and why I am writing this) was the reaction of various students and faculty.

Some of my staunch pro-life activist friends criticized me sharply for the one point I gave the other side. "The rest of the article was good, but you really blew that part", was a typical reaction of my most conservative friends.

A few people said I was biased towards the pro-lifer, as the debate was not really as one-sided as I had made it sound. They pointed to my pro-life work and the fact that the pro-life guy was my professor. They ridiculed the idea that I could be objective. One young woman said to me, "of course you would say the pro-choice person lost!", and she rolled her eyes.

A small handful of people said that they had read the article very carefully, and that they agreed with me on everything, and thought it was brave of me to write that "our guy" (who was easily one of the most popular professors on campus) had stumbled on that one point in the debate which I gave to the lady from Berkeley.

There were some who said that they had seen the article, read the first few paragraphs on page one and decided not to read the rest when they saw that the rest of the article was about a half a page. A friend of mine told me, with a smile, that my article was "way too long", and asked me if I couldn't have made it a lot shorter. Then she winked, and said, "lighten up!"

Maybe it is true that if you get blasted from both sides that it's an indicator that you're not too far off the mark.