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The practical reality is that often when an undergraduate is involved in any kind of accident resulting from what the general public associates with "fraternity behavior"- the fraternity will be named in news articles because it will attract more interest.
Is it right or fair? Of course not. But it is what it is.
Macallan25- your example is a good one for the point I am about to make, though clearly you are not having an official SAE event over Thanksgiving dinner.
What really drives these kinds of incidents is whether the press has access, or even knows to investigate, whether you are in a fraternity when they are reporting on the accident.
As fellow Texas students and graduates appreciate, the Daily Texan paper is always on the watch for fraternity stories they can publish because they have some kind of immature hatred of Greeks.
They sneak into closed parties (thereby breaking the risk management regulations of the University and GLOs- but I guess they figure they are entitled), they wait around at the jailhouse on weekend nights to see who gets arrested- and they investigate to see if names of anyone in an incident of some kind can be linked to a fraternity.
And then they will publish that information with the story.
And it is not just the Daily Texan that does this. In fact, if you read carefully the books "Wrongs of Passage" you will see a great many, if not the majority, of the incidents referenced in that book cannot be reasonably traced to any kind of hazing or other systematic weaknesses in a given Greek chapter. The author takes some care to make note of this in the index of incidents, but the text of the book (all most people will read anyway) does not make these distinctions.
It is good for business when the media can do a negative report on a fraternity member instead of just a regular college student- just like it is good for business to report on the mysterious disappearance of attractive young white women (Peterson, Smart, Holloway etc.) and yet ignore the vastly larger victimization rates of minority women. The isolated incident often arising from a domestic dispute is more important than a serious social issue because it gets more ratings and sells more advertising slots.
The frustration comes from the fact that IHQs, in response largely to demands by insurance companies, have to therefore institute policies like "3 members in a room represent the group no matter the circumstances" to protect the organization as a whole from those few rare instances where something happens to a handful of members and it becomes a major media event.
I don't like it. But I don't see a viable alternative either. Even with the greatest of care by a chapter, eventually someone with some connection (or someone present at an event with no connection) is going to do something dumb. And sometimes those incidents will make the papers.
When I was at Texas there was a very rare sorority pledge death that got no press coverage at all despite some very interesting circumstances. And yet there was weeks of coverage over a time when a Daily Texan reporter illegally snuck into a closed party and reported on the choice of a couple of members to wear black-face.
So make no mistake- this is all a crapshoot and often has little to do with the media seeking to serve the best interests of the public. Major incidents go under the radar at times. And at other times matters that are not even illegal and happen behind closed doors become major events.
What can be done about it? Your guess is as good as mine. This problem goes beyond fraternities- any group is subject to the same risk. And some people in life get really hosed for no good reason.
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