Bad News
A whole lotta years ago, when the Strip was just a medallion of proteinaceous precocity, it got itself into a hellacious fight with its high school administration.
One of this chuck roast’s reporters found out that Mrs. Principal had been holding secret meetings with unhappy parents of the school’s football players who wanted the team’s coach fired. The Strip, the paper’s editor in chief, recognized a banner-headline front page story when it saw one and broke news of the secret meetings in a big way.
Long story short: Mrs. Principal freaked, copies of the paper were locked away, your humble rib-eye protested and was tossed out of school, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer took the case, and months later the Strip was vindicated in court and returned to school in triumph.
What did we learn? That a few double entendres, boneheaded typos and other fast-and-loose uses of student journalism annoy school administrations no end. But what really sends them over the edge is when a student reporter dares to point out uncomfortable truths.
We were reminded of this episode when, a few weeks ago, we heard similar stories coming from the local bastion of higher education, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, which isn’t normally known for the journalistic prowess of its school newspaper.
The University News, after all, is the product of English majors, psychology majors, political-science majors and others who, in their spare time, work as reporters for $15 an article. Funded mostly by student fees, UMKC’s weekly paper does a typical job of covering the campus and its environs and makes its share of mistakes along the way.
But over the past year, UMKC’s student journos have also done their share of catching the school with its pants down.
There was the two-page spread this past February, for example, that laid out in stark detail the small raises given to professors (around 2 percent) in contrast to the sky-high raises — up to 49 percent — handed out to various administrators by groovy, est-loving Chancellor Martha Gilliland.
And there was the more embarrassing banner headline “Sex at Swinney,” which greeted parents visiting the school in April. At the Pitch, we’d heard the same stories that everyone else had — that the men’s gym at the school’s Swinney Recreation Center was known for more man-on-man action than a Tenderloin bathhouse. The U News got confirmation of sorts when it learned that the school had put a stop to the orgiastic tendencies of the place by hiring a towel jockey with a clear view of the notorious sauna. Reporter Yusuf Al-Siddiq cited confidential rec-center sources who admitted that the towel proctor was there to put the kibosh on all the frolicking. He also got an on-the-record non-denial denial from the center’s director.
We heard about the story and chuckled.
But someone else was not so amused. One of the rec center’s honchos confiscated copies of the paper to keep touring parents from seeing it. The paper’s staff cried foul. And for the most part, the school’s administration backed up the young reporters. Gilliland put out a statement defending the paper’s free-speech rights, and Vice Chancellor Pat Long, who oversees the funding paid to U News, tells this chuck roast that although she cut the paper’s funding over the summer by 5 percent for economic reasons, she won’t be making further cuts next year. Besides, she says, she likes the improvements the paper has made, especially since new editor in chief Nick Barron took over this fall.
Unlike the proto-Strip, which had all kinds of problems with a meddling principal, Barron’s problems are coming not from nosy administrators but from his fellow students and their elected leadership. A couple of weeks ago, the school’s Student Government Association passed four scathing resolutions that essentially said “The U News sucks ass, and since we pay for it, we deserve better. Start covering what we do, spell our names right and do it on a smaller budget.”
But in passing the resolutions, the student politicos may have run afoul of case law. Federal precedent says that anyone with influence over the funding of a college newspaper can’t criticize its content — doing otherwise produces a “chilling effect” on the rights of reporters.
While the U News ponders legal action, Barron waits to see whether SGA president Geoff Gerling will sign or veto the resolutions and forward them to the school’s administration.
We called Gerling, a 21-year-old junior majoring in speech communications and psych, and asked him about the brouhaha. “Since I’ve been a student leader, I’ve heard more complaints about the U News than any other thing,” he said. The errors bug him, he says, and he didn’t like that the paper hasn’t been more positive about a new dorm on campus. “And they’ve been knocking the volleyball team on the back page,” he says.
Sheesh. Sounds criminal. We wondered what sort of publication he was looking for. Gerling answered: something he and his fellow senators can “take back to [their] families.”
Say what? Did Gerling think he was in college or day care? Take back to their families? What college student comes home and says, “Hey, Mom, check out what a fantastic issue of the student newspaper our school put out this week.”
That’s some fucked-up shit.
Still, Gerling seemed like a nice enough sort. And he had some savvy — knowing that the budget-cutting suggestion made it look like the SGA wanted to hurt the paper financially as punishment for disagreeing with its content, Gerling admitted to this cutlet that he would veto that part of the resolutions.
That might calm things down some, but the tussle already has attracted the attention of the Society of Professional Journalists, which plans to send some ink-stained wretches to investigate. (The SPJ asked this meat patty to help, an invitation the group likely will rescind after it reads this column.)
In the meantime, Barron says he wishes students who have a problem with his paper would find some other way to complain besides trying to wipe out his newspaper. Write a friggin’ letter already, you dopes.
