Darrah Walker
Lantern Staff
The recent controversy regarding Issue 7 of the Butler Lantern has made it clear that news is not always comfortable.
In his news story, Butler Lantern Reporter Matthew Will informed the public of the arrest of a former student athlete, DeMario Burnett, who was arrested on suspicion of capital murder in January. The reactions that came from Butler students and staff caused the Butler Lantern staff to feel disrespected and upset as they felt that they were just doing their job reporting the facts of the event.
“[It’s] annoying honestly, because not all news is going to be good, and we need to inform all the bad,” Taylor Garcia, a Student Sports Media staff member, said.
As all reporters should, the Butler Lantern staff gather factual information and report on it, leaving readers to make their own judgments. Whether a story is positive or negative, it is the job of a reporter to report on what is going on in the world.
“Some of those things we uncover are unpleasant to people, either because they don’t want to deal with it, acknowledge it or it embarrasses them,” Professor of Mass Communications Keith West said.
Most people expect the truth when they learn about what is going on in their community. Others tend to filter out what is real when it comes to negative events. As a result of the story about Burnett, the Butler Lantern staff discovered that nearly 415 issues had been removed from the El Dorado campus. Two student athletes and a Butler staff member were responsible for the removal of some of the papers, according to an incident report. The staff felt that this was an attempt to censor the publication.
“It was their friend,” an anonymous source said. “They didn’t want people to know that their friend was being charged for a heinous crime.”
In 1971, the newspaper publisher of The Washington Post, Katharine Graham and Editor Ben Bradlee, decided to publish top secret news regarding the Pentagon papers they had access to. Even when both Graham and Bradlee knew they were risking their jobs, they still reported about the lies the U.S. government was hiding in order to inform the public about a matter they found concerning, and they felt the public had a right to know about.
“It is unethical to be untruthful,” an anonymous source said. “Why would news need to be untruthful?”
Unfortunately, the public reacted in disbelief with what Graham and Bradlee reported. The public started to question the U.S. government, and this case was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that most of the information that The Washington Post had could be reported and open to the public. No matter the reactions that came from the public, the Pentagon papers were still reported on.
“People wanted to be able to trust their government,” West said.
The press focuses on informing the public on what events are taking place around the world even if the news is not comforting to a reader.
“The purpose of journalism is thus to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies and their governments,” according to the American Press Institute.
