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Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 18. July 30, 1968

No room......in the flat [Letter to Salient Volume 31, Number 18 July 30, 1968]

No room . . .

A genuine "protest" Sib I wish to make a genuine protest about the treatment of an article I submitted to Salient two weeks ago, replying to Barrie Saunders' criticism of halls of residence, for it was edited (in last week's issue) to meaningless proportions, stripped of any substances, made devoid of any critical content, and then displayed in Salient under the cliched slogan "Kedgley protests".

. . . in the flat

While I have become incredibly bored by the monotonous sameness of Salient headlines -"Labourites Lash Back-Cager attacks White, White attacks Gager . . . '. My boredom was momentarily dissipated, and my anger aroused when this sort of slogan was applied to this article; paraphrased as it was into two meaningless sentences (originally about 700 words), with the sentence I considered least important-the conclusion-thrust into the article, out of all context, with no apparent relevance, simply because it contained a few juicy adjectives-perhaps even the implication of a 'personal attack" (really entering the realm of Salient "hot news"). I would have preferred my article to have been omitted, than to have appeared as yet another supercilious "protest" or "attack", made for the purposes of publicity rather than for its validity. Incidentally, my major criticism of Mr Saunders' article was that he failed to point out that his personal point of view was not that of the entire student body.

While this sort of obsession with the sensational and the personal attack has been a regrettable characteristic of this year's Salient, I would urge that a little more concern was given to content, a little less to the large, black type which smatters every page of Salient.

Yours faithfully,

Sue Kedgley.