We here at the Daily take our jobs very seriously.

We dedicate long hours of our time to put out a paper every day. We strive very hard for accuracy and fairness.

But as is the case with every newspaper, we don’t always get things straight. Many people may notice that corrections are regularly run on Page 2 beneath the weather. But sometimes our mistakes aren’t simple enough to be fixed by a correction.

Such was the case on Oct. 26. The Daily ran a front page story about the re-enactment of a traditional Turkish wedding. The story was accompanied by a photograph claiming to show two Turkish students dancing a Turkish wedding dance.

It seemed like a fairly cut and dry story. I didn’t give it any more thought than the average story until I received a phone call the next day. The caller was an irate student who had attended the event and was upset with the photograph.

The caller claimed the people in the photograph were actually Indian students and they were not dancing a traditional Turkish wedding dance.

In this case, our news gathering process suffered a breakdown in several areas. The ultimate result was that we failed to run a photograph that accurately depicted the event.

The breakdown began when the Daily photographer failed to accurately capture the event on film.

The breakdown continued when the photo editors accepted the photograph and sent it on to me.

And finally, the breakdown was finalized by my lack of scrutiny of the photograph and by allowing it to be placed in the paper.

This breakdown is a good example of something the Daily deals with every day. Having a staff that consists of relatively few minority students, we often struggle to understand the needs and concerns of underrepresented groups on campus. This insensitivity is heightened by the fact that we are forced to make hasty decisions under deadline pressure every day.

This became apparent during International Week. We ran a preview story about the week, but then failed to cover any of the week’s events for the next four days. There probably would have been no coverage at all if it hadn’t been for a caller who was wondering why we were ignoring such prominent news events on campus.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, when my editors and I made our daily decisions of what was newsworthy on campus, International Week was placed on the back burner. It was an oversight that was not intentional. But it was insensitive.

Another incident happened when two Muslim students came to speak with me about some of the Associated Press stories that we were choosing to run. The stories involved violence in the Middle East, and those accused of the violence were described as Muslim radicals.

As was pointed out to me, if the accused were Christian, would they have been described as Christian radicals? My answer was probably not. The media bias was very obvious to me. But it didn’t appear obvious until somebody came to the office and pointed out the problem.

All three of these instances were too complex to tackle with a correction, and even though I’ve dedicated this column to admitting our shortfalls in these cases, little can be done to rectify those past situations.

But at least students cared enough about these issues to share their concerns about them with me. Hopefully by pointing out our shortcomings, we can become more sensitive to them in the future.

And hopefully we can learn from our mistakes to become a better newspaper that better serves all of its readers.

We need to be accountable to our readers. And when we’re not, we need to hear about it.

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Troy McCullough is a senior in journalism mass communication from Pleasantville. He is the editor in chief of the Daily.