So on Friday, I filed a petition with the ASUO Constitution Court, asking it to halt the Programs Finance Committee’s recall process until procedures for recall hearings could be written.
And no, I’m not here to plead my case. That’s for the court to decide based on the Emerald’s complaint. Instead, I want to explain the conundrum the newspaper found itself in, so that our appeal to the court doesn’t appear to be sour grapes.
It certainly could look that way. Our news coverage explained that the ASUO Executive recommendation for the Emerald’s incidental fee allocation represented a nearly $11,000 decrease to our incidental fee allocation. Readers could think we were just mad.
On the other hand, before the Emerald’s PFC hearing, the editorial board wrote that PFC was wrong in cutting OSPIRG’s budget. Readers could think PFC members recalled the Emerald’s budget because they were mad.
Both of these situations show the dilemma we face as a news organization. Part of our core duty is to be a watchdog of student government, and surely that means being a close watchdog on the arm of government that handles the money. Unfortunately, that’s the same arm that holds the purse strings of our student subscription fee.
Other news organizations have concerns slightly similar to these: Unduly angering advertisers or large segments of the subscribing population can be hazardous to the bottom line. That doesn’t mean, however, that journalists should do their job with any less scrutiny. And no other American news outlet has the government controlling all the dollars of its largest subscriber base.
Regardless of the outcome, we try to cover student government with the utmost fairness, including fairly criticizing the government or running less-than-flattering articles if they are warranted. But for this particular story, I decided we needed a split between the organization as fee-seeking group and the organization as news-gathering group.
As soon as I heard that PFC was recalling the Emerald’s budget, I removed myself from any news decisions about the story. Jessica Richelderfer, my managing editor, and Brook Reinhard, one of my news editors, are in charge of deciding what to cover and how to cover it. I told them simply to think about the story as if it was some other student group. How would they cover the story if it was about the Oregon Commentator or the Oregon Marching Band?
My role in this is as administrator for the group. My interests need to be in representing the Emerald before PFC, not in deciding how to cover our hearing procedure. Certainly, I don’t want our budget cut; we’re doing the same job we always have while facing increased costs as well as a larger student population to serve.
What I hope for the most, though, is a resolution to this yearly dilemma. It would be nice if PFC and the Emerald could develop a formula for the bulk student subscription that could be used year after year, so that the appearance of reprisal or caprice can be eliminated.
After all, regardless of the outcome of our incidental fee allocation, we still have to keep reporting on what student government does — whether it looks like sour grapes or not. We can’t change that, but maybe we can engage the process in a way that makes it easier for everyone to do their job.