On Monday, President Barack Obama called U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa “the definition of chutzpah” after the California Republican and unrelenting Obama White House critic had the audacity to feature a picture of the commander in chief working at his Oval Office desk in a campaign mailer boasting Issa’s bipartisan credentials.
But following The Advocate’s shockingly glib editorial on Wednesday regarding The Daily Reveille’s student-led decision to reduce print frequency, that’s a presidential designation I wish Obama would have waited to bestow upon Advocate editorial page editors Danny Heitman and Lanny Keller, editor in chief Peter Kovacs, general manager Sheila Runnels and publisher Dan Shea.
The Advocate’s editorial board said our recent decision to produce an enlarged weekly newspaper and focus more on our digital footprint across the LSU community was an “unnecessary retreat” the infamously press-averse former Gov. Huey Long would have celebrated.
What they failed to mention was literally any contextualization of our dire fiscal situation or the fact that there would be no Reveille at all if LSU Student Media continued depleting its financial reserves at current rates. The Advocate also failed to acknowledge that our new, 32-page product will allow more of the long-form, investigative stories Huey Long would have detested.
The Advocate’s gravest omission, though, is this: After it published an impassioned editorial in August 2015 — titled, “Avoid downhill path to extinction – keep LSU’s Reveille a daily paper” — representatives from the LSU Office of Student Media met personally with Advocate publisher Dan Shea on May 19 to beg The Advocate to put its money where its mouth was and help shoulder some of the burden of the Reveille’s printing costs.
We voiced a willingness to convert to a broadsheet instead of tabloid publication to make The Advocate’s potential printing of our paper easier, and even raised the possibility of an advertising partnership. But after leading us on for two months, The Advocate eventually backed out of any potentially cost-saving deal in a July 14 email. Not even a donation was made.
I don’t know what’s worse — professional journalists at the state’s largest newspaper not standing alongside student reporters as they sensibly and bravely navigated one of the toughest editorial decisions of their lifetimes, or The Advocate’s refusal to acknowledge its de facto complicity in the Reveille’s reduction in print frequency.
But I can tell you this much: the latter would have earned all of our hard-working students an F in any of their media ethics classes.
