One hard rule we have here at the Mustang Daily is don’t quote journalism students, even if they aren’t on the paper. Personally, I always felt a bit put out about it. We try to get a variety of voices in the paper, but the voice of journalism students is silenced as a policy.
Granted, it’s mostly journalism students that end up selecting what goes in the paper and what stories we run online, but not everyone in journalism works for the paper and most journalism students, most people, are very opinionated. It’s just an industry goal to be as objective as possible. So I decided to ask students’ opinion about our lack of opinion. All sources in this piece are journalism majors, and the topic is about journalism, so I feel that any bias shown is completely forgivable.
Our editor-in-chief Leticia Rodriguez thinks it’s obvious that journalism majors are people, too, and that we do have opinions. However, our department is small and you know the majority of the people in it, and it’s like asking a friend what they think instead of an actual interview.
“It really pushes reporters to get out of their comfort zone by going to an engineering student or an architecture student, or kinesiology or whoever,” she said. “It’s just getting the reporters to expand their mind, expand their abilities, their interview abilities, and just getting more comfortable with the interviewing process all together.”
Kaytlyn Leslie is the news editor and next year’s editor-in-chief. Her opinion is that one of the major reasons we enforce the rule is that people would just ask journalism students because it’s easy and they’re in the same building.
“I hate it when people do that because then they’re not getting the best sources,” Leslie said. “They’re not actually going out and searching for the best people. Every once in a while it’s OK to use journalism students as sources, like when they are an important part of it when they’re the major player in some event or something like that, then I’m OK with it.”
One such story in which journalism students were the major players was the recent KCPR fundraiser story last week. However, no journalism students were quoted in the story.
Catherine Borgeson is connected with KCPR, but feels that she would be biased if interviewed about it.
“I probably know a lot of inside information and people to talk to and points that I would want talked about and addressed as opposed to others,” she said. “It’s kind of a double-edged thing where you know more about the subject so you might have some better insight, but you have some bias. I think it’s just better overall.”
Victoria Billings is a reporter for the Mustang Daily who wrote the KCPR fundraising story. She tries not to have an opinion in order to avoid conflicts, especially when it comes to politics.
“It’s hard, for instance with the rape cases, I have very strong feelings about women’s rights and things like that,” she said. “So that was kind of hard, trying to avoid that.”
Sarah Gilmore is the arts editor for the Mustang Daily and said not printing journalism students’ names is fair.
“Because it would be really easy to ask only journalism students … you have to draw the line somewhere,” she said.
Gilmore’s desk buddy, sports editor Brian de Los Santos, also agrees with the policy.
“I guess a lot of people go off assumptions,” he said. “If you see a journalism student quoted in a story written by a journalism student, it does look kind of lazy, but at the same time you can’t avoid it.”
Karlee Prazak is a copy editor, reporter and next year’s managing editor. She personally wouldn’t feel comfortable commenting on a story when she’s so involved in the newspaper itself, calling it a conflict of interest. However, as a normal student she can see how it can be frustrating to have an opinion and not be heard as equally as other majors in the paper.
“At the same time I understand that a journalism student would probably be more willing to comment and answer a question better just because they are a journalism student so they know where the other person is coming from,” Prazak said. “It’d be easier to twist the article the way you want it.”
So the consensus is that it makes the reporter appear biased and lazy. The kicker is that I just proved the second is completely true. I was in the same room the entire time and only got up from my chair once because our editor-in-chief has her own office and it’d look weird if I wheeled my swivel chair across the room to it.