A challenging story

By Editorial

Last Wednesday was a tough day for the staff of The Santa Clara. That was when we received word that sophomore David Crowell had suddenly collapsed and died. The paper's staff mobilized reporters and prepared for what would be a long evening covering such a tragic story.

However, what was ultimately challenging was not writing a story or modifying our schedule, but instead facing the borderline hysteria and censorship by students and university officials angry with us for daring to cover Crowell's death.

Sadly, mistrust and censorship are not new for the press. Reporters and editors face far more than these challenges today. Worldwide, our colleagues are imprisoned or harassed for simply doing their job.

From the public's end, our profession is either seen as being unpatriotic (from the right) or full of corporate toadies (from the left). There is little middle ground. Unfortunately, under such pessimism í-- some of which is perpetuated by our own faculty -- the reader ultimately loses.

The Crowell coverage

When reporters hear about catastrophic events, such as in Crowell's case, they try to get the story by methodically calling sources, doing interviews and scrupulous editing. Journalism, unlike colloquial interactions between college students, is not based on hearsay and rumor. For The Santa Clara, only hours stood between the initial story and press time Wednesday evening.

But to many of our fellow students and administrators, covering the event was rude and insensitive. The university's frustration reached critical mass when two of our reporters and a photographer were kicked out of a residence hall for interviews, and later banned from Crowell's vigil in the Walsh Hall basement.

Censoring reporters, however benign the intentions, does more to hurt the story than act sensitively about a fallen student.

Residence Life Director Scott Strawn, who barred The Santa Clara from covering the evening vigil in Walsh, argued that it was the university's goal to create a "safe space" for people to grieve. That's a fair argument if students gathered in their private rooms. But Crowell's vigil was a public event for anyone to attend. Whatever technical rules and policies the university used to bolster its decision should have been outweighed by an imperative to get the story.

Sensitivity to sources

To some readers, this page may appear to be insensitive to David Crowell, his friends and his family. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Contrary to what we see in movies, reporters don't live to stick microphones in others' faces or camp-out on front lawns. In fact, reporters from The Santa Clara were more than polite -- they asked appropriate questions only after the source granted them an interview.

There were also calls to hold our story until this week. But doing so would have been journalistically inappropriate. Besides a significant delay in reporting a story, we would have missed most of the emotion that was ultimately captured in last week's edition. We would have done the story -- and Crowell -- a disservice by producing a more generic and less newsworthy story a week after his death.

Yet amid warnings by the university (that students didn't want to talk), this newspaper interviewed more than a dozen who did. Many knew David, and all were eager to talk about the loss of an old friend or classmate. Sometimes, artificial "safe spaces," which seem to exist solely in academia, blur reality.

Our responsibility to you

Readers ultimately deserve well-vetted and well-written stories. They don't deserve dumbed-down or incomplete news because those in authority want to take control and stop reporters from asking questions.

In short, we were shocked to see such a negative reaction to this newspaper when it merely reported an event that any news organization would have covered. Our ultimate goal is to deliver accurate news, and it's hard to do that in the face of emotionally driven opposition.

We hope that if future catastrophes arise, both students and administrators will be sensitive to our mission as a newspaper, just as we ourselves were courteous to the people we interviewed. Accurate news-gathering deserves nothing less.