Note: President Tate formally apologized to The Reveille staff for his comments a day after this editorial was published.

LSU President William Tate IV doesn’t seem to be a fan of our coverage. During a Board of Regents budget meeting on Tuesday, he said so publicly. 

“Every student newspaper article in all the systems, if you pick them up, 95% of the information is negative,” Tate said. “The negative instinct is overwhelming in journalism. They cannot help themselves.”

Tate seemed to notice that his comments struck a nerve among some LSU faculty and Manship School of Mass Communication alumni and students, as he attempted later that day to clarify his position and say he values journalism on Twitter. 

“I hold journalism in high regard. As a scientist speaking to a group about how institutions are described, I built on the empirical realities of the negative instinct,” Tate tweeted. 

Which empirical reality was the “95%” figure based on? The editorial board searched for academic articles showing this to be true. We couldn’t find anything. 

We’d expect a trained epidemiologist to be more careful about throwing out anecdotal numbers to prove a point, especially when a quick browse of The Reveille’s website shows how ridiculous the claim is. 

Here are the headlines of some of the latest Reveille news stories:

• “LSU, SG to introduce reusable to-go box alternative in dining halls”

• “LSU assists in bringing humanity back to the moon through partnership with NASA”

• “’If you can see it, you can be it’: Student organizations work to empower women in male-dominated fields”

• “Muslim Student Association brings LSU Muslim students community, comfort on campus”

This isn’t the first time Tate has criticized The Reveille’s coverage.

He said in a September 2021 interview with The Reveille that every news article he reads is a critique of an institution. At a Faculty Senate meeting in August, he referenced The Reveille’s Page 1 story about the string of crimes during the first week of school, saying that the negative bias in journalism makes these events seem worse than they are. 

It’d be interesting to know what coverage, specifically, Tate takes issue with. Or, maybe, what we’ve reported on that he’d rather you didn’t know.

Was it our recent front page story about LSU ending its contract with Sexual Trauma and Awareness Response? Our coverage last fall of protests sparked by revelations of yet another instance of LSU mishandling rape cases? Our in-depth series last semester about LSU infrastructure problems? 

Amplifying students’ complaints about parking and other capacity issues at the university? Or that recent story about crime on campus?

Does Tate take an issue with how we cover these issues, or the fact that we cover them at all?

The president’s recent statements are in stark contrast to the praise he gave student media upon his arrival at LSU in August 2021.

“I have three principles that guide my leadership: Seek truth. Be empathetic. Demonstrate a courageous act. If you have a student media that is seeking the truth, and they’re empathetic, and they’re courageous, you’re a better campus,” Tate said in an interview with Tiger TV. “And so for me, I view journalistic activity in general, but obviously students who want to be in that world both while they’re students and perhaps as a career, as vitally important to a robust campus.”

He said, too, that students have a unique opportunity to represent issues on campus.

“There’s a part of being a student that allows you to say some things that some people can’t or won’t, and so I love it,” he said. “I think it’s extremely important that students have a voice in that way.”

It seems that the president is less eager about student journalists seeking truth when it comes to his own administration.

We agree with what Tate said when he arrived at LSU: Our primary job as journalists is to seek truth. It takes empathy. It takes courage. And, often, it makes people in power upset – including, evidently, the president.

It’s not our job to do PR for the university, and it never will be. The Reveille’s history of being censored by overly sensitive administrators lives fresh in the mind of Reveille reporters and Manship alumni. We hope that Tate’s comments were a lapse in judgment, and not revelatory of a more troubling attitude toward student media.

President Tate, we always welcome an opportunity to interview you and get your perspective. But if you’d prefer to bash us publicly, feel free. It won’t slow us down one bit.

Piper Hutchinson contributed reporting to this article.