When Student Government election season rolls around every year, everyone affiliated with The Daily Reveille newsroom is told to follow the same protocol: no campaigning, no taking push cards and no showing any form of bias in reporting.
As journalists, it’s of the utmost importance to us that we maintain our credibility by being objective throughout the campaign season. We were stunned to find out that someone who works in The Daily Reveille’s advertising department is a vice presidential candidate in the spring elections.
The Daily Reveille, while one entity under the University’s Office of Student Media, has two distinct components: editorial and advertising. Every article, photo, video and column that runs is under my discretion since I’m the editor in chief of the paper.
I do not, however, control most of the advertising content that we run. The people who work in our advertising department do not report to me, they do not have to follow our newsroom policies and they are in a separate office that’s not connected to our newsroom.
We’re not happy that our credibility could come into question during election season since a Reveille employee who’s outside of our newsroom is causing a conflict of interest.
This is my letter to you, the students and campus community, telling you that our SG election coverage will not change. Our advertising department exercises no control over the editorial content of our newspaper, and most of our newsroom employees do not even know the advertising employee who is running for SG elections.
Legally, as per the U.S. Constitution, we cannot deny anyone his or her right to run for public office. Ethically, we can shake our heads and say we wish our advertising department had the same policies that our newsroom, along with KLSU, LEGACY magazine, TigerTV and the LSU Gumbo Yearbook follows.
Our SG coverage will still be impartial. Newsroom employees will still turn down push cards in Free Speech Plaza and we will still write our election stories in alphabetical order by the presidential candidate’s last name. On election day and results day, we will still encourage our SG reporter and editors directly involved in SG coverage to pick out the earth tones from their closets as to not appear on the side of any particular ticket.
The leaders of each Student Media entity are working to decide if we should craft a policy for Student Media across the board to prevent this sort of conflict of interest in the future.
Until then, we apologize to our readers who have lost trust in us because of this. If you think our coverage is biased, feel free to send a letter to the editor at [email protected]. You can also get in touch with Kodi Wilson, our advertising sales manager, at [email protected].
