By Emmet O’Connor
The Combat Zone section of the University of Puget Sound’s student-run newspaper, The Trail, has a misinformation problem. After several complaints were made by readers, an investigation by the Board of University Truth Tellers (an outside private organization that investigates student-run newspapers) has found a multitude of flagrant mistruths. The extent of the lying has permeated the Combat Zone since its inception, so the scope of the Combat Zone articles mentioned in this debriefing does not cover all of the lies.
One of these fake stories was published on Dec. 5, 2008. The “news” story centers around the LIE that the last turkey in Washington, Patrick Gobbles, was killed during a Black Friday rush that he participated in during his effort to get a new HD plasma television. The lies here are fairly obvious. The real Patrick Gobbles did not die in a 2008 Black Friday Rush, but rather died a year later due to holiday dinner-related causes. These lies affect people, or in this case turkeys, yet these falsehoods are immortalized in the University’s JSTOR archives without critical inspection of their validity.
The B.U.T.T. also looked at more recent issues of The Trail where they discovered that the lies were not relegated to the earlier editions of the student-run newspaper. In a 2019 article, a Combat Zone writer claimed that the Dining Dollar had gone up by 1000%. This is a mistelling of true events. The Dining Dollar did go up that year, but only by 600%, which is significantly less than what the writer had claimed. The rest of the article elaborates on the struggles of students who were cursed by rapid inflation. However, it ignores the benefits of that inflation, namely the reworking of the dining dollar system in the model of wartime economies so that the prices for our favorite bites from the allergy station were fixed. These lies, particularly those about our beloved university, disparage the hard work that our administration does for us.
The Combat Zone should be ashamed of their conduct during the investigation of the section as well. When one current writer was approached for his lies by the Board of University Truth Tellers, he started sprinting, jumping over a fence with surprising grace and yelling “you will never stop us!” He did, however, drop his bag full of candy wrappers and, more importantly, a notebook of future Combat Zone article ideas. We tried to approach the Editor-in-Chief of The Trail Andrew Benoit, but he denied any relationship to or knowledge of the Combat Zone.
There are two roads that The Trail can take. One easy remedy for the situation is by summarily executing the Combat Zone writers who are spreading these heinous and damaging lies. Another option available is for the Editor-in-Chief to pay an exuberant fee of $15 in Kohl’s Cash to the Board of University Truth Tellers. This decision is ultimately up to Andrew Benoit, but for the sake of the writers, I hope that he pays up. But for the sake of capital T truth, there must be some repercussions for the lying Combat Zone writers. Some propositions included, but were not limited to: wearing the Grizz Suit for a month straight, being bound to the tree and spending another two years in Todd Phibbs.