The Real Story?

Yesterday in BYU's newspaper, The Universe, an article was written entitled "Royal, Strong and 0-2."  My husband came and visited me for lunch yesterday, and he was reading this article.  After discussing it with him, I thought he made some pretty valid points.  There are some misleading statements in this article, and I wanted to address them since they are kind of media-related.

The first frustration with this article is this: the title was clearly written before the article!  The title doesn't match the message.  It is misleading on so many levels.  If you read this story, it contradicts itself.  Sterling Randle, the writer of this piece, was trying to play off of BYU's "Royal, Strong, and True."  Randle manipulated facts to meet his own story, and then buried the facts at the end.


Which leads me to frustration two: in journalism, writers use the inverted pyramid style.  What this means is the writer puts the most important information at the beginning of the article, that way, if cuts need to be made, the editor can cut from the bottom up.  The third to last paragraph is where the accurate statistics are.

I will end with this frustration: was this article supposed to be about the pants or about the jerseys?  Randle stated that BYU's football record wearing the royal blue jerseys is 0-2, but that is FALSE!!  BYU is 0-2 wearing all royal - royal jersey and royal pants (see picture to the right); they have a 2-2 record wearing their royal jersey and white pants (as shown in the picture above, left).

Okay, fine, one more - white is the official uniform, not an alternative!

Here is the link to the original article if you are interested:  Royal, strong and 0-2

And here is a question for all the readers out there: is this trend common in the media?  And if so, where and why?