Staff Editorial
Wichita State University’s student led paper, The Sunflower, has experienced quite a slap in the face over the past couple of weeks. The Sunflower, which has received a budget of $105,000 for the 2017-2018 academic year, is in danger of only receiving half of that next year.
Wichita State University’s (WSU) Student Fees Committee made the decision to bar reporters from both the Wichita Eagle and their own newspaper, The Sunflower, from attending a discussion on Friday, Feb. 23 about how student fees should be distributed across campus. During those discussions, it was recommended that The Sunflower’s funding should be cut to $55,000 in 2019, almost half of what it was the previous year, and only a third of the $158,000 requested by The Sunflower.
The Sunflower has been known not to publish the most flattering news of WSU. In a column published by The Sunflower on Monday, Feb. 26, Editor-in-Chief Chance Swain and Columnist Ray Strunk detailed the ways that the cut funding of The Sunflower has ties to their critical coverage of WSU. As with what happened to us when our first issue of the 2018 spring semester had disappeared all over campus because some were unhappy with coverage of a former Butler student athlete’s potential involvement with a murder in Alabama, attempts to silence the press because of critical coverage has the opposite effect. The Sunflower is a highly regarded newspaper, and the funding cuts have already made it to The Wichita Eagle and the Student Press Law Center, just like when our papers were taken. Don’t “shoot the messenger” as they call it, because in these cases, it shows forcible attempts to silence and forcible attempts to silence usually imply guilt.
The argument here is that The Sunflower is not doing a very good job of selling advertisements and is relying too heavily on student fees. That being said, anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper can argue that ad selling is probably one of the hardest things that a newspaper has to achieve. As far as student fees go, according to an article on Kansas.com, Wichita State students only pay an average of $7 per year to help fund The Sunflower. Mere pennies compared to the $340 that each student pays just for Wichita State to join the American Athletic Conference every year.
When the Butler Lantern had our bout of controversy at the start of the semester, The Sunflower published an editorial standing with us. We, as members of the student press, strive to report the facts occurring on our campuses, and we cannot do that under threat of funding cuts or censorship. As journalists, we report the uncomfortable, we report on the difficult, we aren’t journalists for the glory and we aren’t journalists because we like to be troublemakers. We are journalists because we believe in the freedom of information to all. Attempts to silence us only show that we are doing our jobs correctly and that steels our resolve to continue doing what we’re doing. We at the Butler Lantern stand with The Sunflower and all other student publications across Kansas, and the rest of the country, who are continuing to report the controversial facts surrounding their campuses even under the threat of administrative, faculty or student backlash. They serve as lighthouses for all student journalists on what we all signed up for by taking that byline: to report and continue reporting.