In Friday’s Daily, you may have noticed a letter on the opinion page titled “Ag Week important.”

Four students in animal science pointed out the “ineptitude and flagrant liberal bias displayed by the editors of the Iowa State Daily,” because we gave Coming Out Week more coverage than Ag Week.

Not that I mind being called liberal and inept, but let me explain to you why the writers of this article are wrong. I could just let all the letter writers over on page five today do my explaining for me, but I want everyone to know from where our “biased” coverage comes.

First of all, Alex Rodeck, Krysta Strysko, Angela Johnson and Carrie Basak are right about the coverage. We did run five front-page articles about Coming Out Week. And we did only run one story and one feature photo on Ag Week, and they both ran inside.

News judgment is an interesting process. Deciding which events to cover and how to cover the events we choose can be pretty tough. I am forced constantly to judge whether one event or one meeting or one lecture or one philanthropy is more important than another, and I second guess myself quite a bit.

But there is no doubt in my mind that we covered both Ag Week and National Coming Out Days the right way.

Here’s why.

Fourteen percent of Iowa State students are from farming families. And although I don’t fall into that category, my grandparents are farmers, and my dad grew up on a farm.

I would imagine that most ISU students who have never lived on farms themselves have family or friends who do. By benefit of spending part of their childhoods in Iowa, which more than 16,800 ISU students did, or having lived elsewhere in the Midwest, ISU as a community understands agriculture.

Students here — myself included — know full well the difficulties of farming. We know the challenges facing the noble men and women who spend their lives toiling on a farm.

But those problems, and the problems mentioned in Friday’s letter to the editor, are not what last week’s Ag Week was about.

In the story we wrote last Tuesday about Ag Week, the vice president of the agricultural council said as much.

“Ag Week takes place to raise awareness for different clubs in the College of Agriculture,” said Angie Pithan, senior in public service and administration in agriculture. “Ag Week gives freshmen and transfer students a chance to meet others in the agriculture department, and it introduces people to clubs.”

Now, compare that to the goals of National Coming Out Days.

The very purpose of National Coming Out Days was to educate Iowa State about the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. Their purpose was to teach people here about what it’s like to come from a completely different perspective than the vast majority of the population in a very personal and crucial area of our lives.

Consider some of the events of National Coming Out Days.

There was a rally on central campus, a forum about coming out in the residence halls and an “Aqueerium” to show that homosexuals aren’t freaks or monsters.

Now, consider some of Ag Week’s events.

A mock interview, a manufacturing presentation, a hayride, a volleyball tournament, a chili cook-off.

I’m sure these events were great fun for everyone involved, and they do deserve coverage in the Daily. But they were designed to make ag students interact with each other — not to shed light on under-covered topics and not, as Friday’s letter suggests, to educate the world of problems in agriculture.

Ag Week served an entirely different purpose than National Coming Out Days, and therefore, it received entirely different coverage.

Education on problems in agriculture is important. It’s important to learn about the intricacies of the Freedom to Farm Act and the controversies of genetical engineering.

Those topics should be in the Daily. And they are. Every week.

Every Tuesday, on page seven, we run a special Agriculture page. The page covers everything from those topics listed above to students who go home every weekend to farm and the Farm Economy Team.

We at the Daily don’t have a lesbian and gay page, which must be some oversight of our liberal consciousness. But we do have a weekly ag page, because we recognized long ago how essential agriculture is to our state and to our specific audience.

Ag Week was important. So are all of the weeklong celebrations put on by different elements of the Iowa State population.

But some serve more educational purposes than just to encourage social interaction among students in specific majors.

We will give those educational events front-page coverage.

If that’s liberal bias, so be it.

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Sara Ziegler is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Sioux Falls, S.D. She is editor in chief of the Daily.