Now, I knew the Collegian was openly biased throughout the Undergraduate Student Government elections, and that bothered me. I also knew that they were unfair by providing incomplete information on the candidates, and that bothered me as well. However, when I saw the article maligning the O'Brien/Annechini victory on Thursday, I was disgusted.

All journalistic integrity was thrown out the window. The reporters printed the worst possible quotes, exaggerated every bad thing that occurred, ignored every good thing that occurred and focused their article on alcohol rather than the fact that O'Brien/Annechini won this election by the biggest margin in recent history.

There is one thing our friends at the Collegian need to understand: You did not succeed in making Corey O'Brien look stupid. What you did do is make your newspaper and its staff look stupid. When students read such articles, they don't say, "Corey O'Brien and his supporters must be idiots because the Collegian told me so," they say, "What a horrible article. The Collegian reporters and editors are the idiots."

You see, students do not trust your paper or respect your opinions. The massive repudiation of the Collegian endorsement of Josh Bokee is but one example of that. It stems from this: Every time you take an openly biased position on an issue (the USG election), you lose respect. Every time you take cheap shots at someone (the O'Brien/Annechini victory), you lose respect. And every time you do it with no journalistic finesse whatsoever, you lose respect.

I don't know if you folks think you're being crafty when you attempt to manipulate public opinion in this manner ... but you're not. Any moron could see that the Collegian was going out of its way to get Josh Bokee elected. The least your reporters could have done after Corey and Kara won was have a little common courtesy and write a responsible article about their victory. Instead, they chose to act like pouting children and strove to portray the O'Brien/Annechini victory in the worst possible way.

If you're going to be petty and manipulative, at least do us the service of trying to do it well. That article lacked any clever sarcasm or wit whatsoever.

Perhaps Courtney Cairns, the new editor in chief, can begin to repair the Collegian and change its juvenile attitude. Hopefully, she can prevent the children from running amok and using Collegian Inc. as a vehicle for their personal agendas. I believe she has some respect for her position and will attempt to make this paper an objective source of news for Penn State. Perhaps then the Collegian might regain a bit of the respect it has lost.