Quote:
Originally Posted by macallan25
You know as well as I do how the media (The Statesman, etc.) in Austin treats Greeks. They present articles and information with an extreme amount of bias and a general disdain for everything associated with us, especially the fraternities.
It's been an extremely long and difficult ordeal, we hope to get it resolved soon.
|
I certainly wish you all well in that- and yes, I well remember how the papers treated us. Mostly the Daily Texan back in my day though- the involvement of city newspapers was less common.
When that young man died last fall who was in that newer GLO located over by 19th and Rio Grande, it not only got Statesman coverage but there were several articles in the Houston Chronicle as well.
Not sure why the trend, but my first theory is that city newspapers in general are moving in a direction where they pick up and sensationalize stories like this in an effort to emulate the more successful cable network format and try to hang on to their readership as the newspaper format becomes less relevant and relied on in general.
Back in my time, the Daily Texan ran articles for MONTHS because someone had been photographed indoors at a private fraternity party (not a Beta party, but one of the other big houses at the time) wearing blackface- and he was photographed by someone who illegally entered the party for the paper, thus violating one of those key risk management concepts (no open parties) that our critics like to think we ignore.
Granted, if I ever dropped by my chapter and saw someone in blackface I would be pretty pissed, but there is no grounds for such a thing done indoors on private property to be broadcast in the media.
Come to think of it, maybe I should not be so surprised about the ethics of many journalists considering what a lot of the student journalists at Texas were practicing in their formative years. (To be fair, the Daily Texan appears far more responsibly run now than it was back then.)