Video courtesy of Connor H. O’Brien
Several weeks ago, a man named Dan Joseph from MRCTV came to AU and shot a video where he asked students whether or not they could name a single U.S. senator. The results were not pretty.
In the video, over a dozen students could not name a single U.S. senator. However, I heard reports that Mr. Joseph actually interviewed dozens of students, cherry-picked his results and edited his video to fit an agenda. Several friends and I decided to see if there was any truth to his video, and thus The Swoop was born.
We are a video news team that will be shooting videos on campus in the future. Our team went around campus and asked a random student at each of the main buildings on campus a similar question to Mr. Joseph’s: “Do you know who your congressmen is?”
We interviewed 12 students in the course of about two hours. To make sure it was fair, we verified that every interviewee was an AU student and that they had lived in one state for more than a year. The results showed that eight students out of 12 could successfully name their congressmen. By chance, one of the students we interviewed and got the question right told us that she was also interviewed by Mr. Joseph and had gotten the question right but was not featured in his video.
The Swoop did not go about this endeavor to defend the honor of the school nor blemish it. In fact, we are quite neutral on the subject (though we admit we are no fans of the WONK campaign). We were merely trying to show the truth, unlike Dan Joseph, and we intend to do more of such stories in the future.
Connor Herrick O’Brien is a sophomore in the School of International Service.
