How we ousted the ‘Douglas Press’
By Chandler Walter, Assistant Editor
The year: 1976.
The place: Douglas College.
The longstanding newspaper, the Douglas Press, had full reign over the student body. Slander and lies were spread throughout the school, and any who opposed the tyranny of the paper would succumb to its powerful wrath.
Knowledge was forbidden. Integrity was cast to the wind. The paper printed what the paper wanted to print, and damn anyone who said otherwise. The professors were terrified, knowing that if a bad word was spoken from their lips, a new scandal would spring up seemingly out of the blue, and their jobs would eventually be forfeit. The DSU had fought a long, hard battle against the Douglas Press, with both sides politically maneuvering around the other in a metaphorical—though sometimes literal, when things got boring at lunch—game of chess, neither side giving up a foot of hypothetical ground. Eventually, they found themselves in a stalemate, and each allowed for the other’s existence, begrudgingly.
For years afterwards, the Douglas Press was left to its own devices, printing outrageous stories of fabricated lies, and the students could do nothing but eat it up with a spoon and a smile.
But there were some who resisted.
A last alliance of writers and readers formed, in secret, in the basement of Douglas College; there they created a group that would forever change the fate of the post-secondary institution.
From the burned-out ashes of truth, civility, and an informed democratic student body emerged the Other Press.
None knew what to think of the new paper, as it secretly found its way into the hands of Douglas College students. For so long had they been fed falsities and rumours, that a properly-sourced and correctly quoted article was foreign to their eyes. It was as if they were awakening from a dream they had been trapped in for far too long, and as their eyes adjusted to the wonders of the well-written word, they were reborn.
The Douglas Press would not be ousted so easily, however, and when backed into a corner they bared their fangs and showed their claws. An inquiry into the legitimacy of the Other Press’s first EIC, Laura Melley, was launched, and though she had a record as clear as a Windex’d windshield, the Douglas Press still claimed to have found solid evidence of plagiarism, typed from her own very fingertips.
There was no fighting it. The students were convinced. For so long had they been mesmerized by the written word of the Douglas Press, so long had those ideas seeped into their minds, that they did not even think to question the validity of their free press.
So Melley did what she had to do; she stepped down as Editor-In-Chief. She bore the cross that none should have had to bear, and allowed a struggling Other Press to live on.
And live on it did. Over the course of two years the Other Press fought time and time again against the slanderous lies of the Douglas Press, and little by little, the student body regained their grasp of the truth.
And now, the Other Press remains as the other student paper at Douglas College, having ousted the Douglas Press long ago.
Now we are free to create fabricated articles, full of untruths, straight from the depths of our imaginations.
At least in the Humour section, that is.
*Evilly Cackles*
