EDITORIAL: ETHICS
Well, well, well ... It's election time at Rice, and we sure have gotten the season off to an incredibly weird start -- even weirder than the Texarkana Tango with Ross Perot, George Bush and Bill Clinton. The Thresher is under fire as an organization for running a column two weeks ago by our news editor, George Hatoun, who is a candidate for a position in the Student Association Senate, the same organization he criticized in his column. Students all across campus are talking about the Thresher , ethics and conflict of interest -- a common occurrence around election time.
Two letters that were submitted last week in response to Hatoun's column were held from publication due to the publication time constraints and the very vague section of the SA By-laws dealing with these types of situations where a "candidate" in an election gets a 250-word same-issue right of reply to any letters submitted about him/her prior to election. The problem involved whether Hatoun was indeed a candidate at that time. The Elections Committee ruled that he was a candidate the minute he turned in a petition, but another factor was at work -- campaigning had not officially begun. The letters identified Hatoun as a candidate and then criticized him personally. According to the Thresher 's interpretation, this is negative campaigning. Hatoun's response would be campaigning.
We apologize to the two authors, but the situation became extremely complex with the introduction of libel law and the distinction of whether Hatoun was a public figure at the time (a distinction completely different from that of his candidacy), and we were forced to consult with lawyers at the Student Press Law Center. Hopefully, you can see the complexity of the issue which was solved only by holding the two letters one week.
Having established the background, I will neither agree nor disagree with the content of Hatoun's column. I will focus on the terms that were thrown around by the Rice community in criticizing the paper and the policies of The Rice Thresher . To address the question of why we ran the column requires a quick look at Thresher policy and decision-making.
Why we ran the column:
* First and foremost, let's dispel a myth. It was NOT a conflict of interest on the Thresher 's part to have run the column because Hatoun was NOT reporting on the SA, had not reported on the SA for several months and was not going to report on the SA ever again. Bias in his news articles has never been nor ever will be permitted. Bias in newsreporting was nonexistent in this case as there was no newsreporting -- this was an opinion piece. But, ethically speaking, anything that we do the two weeks prior to an election can be construed as a conflict of interest because half of our staff is running for a position. Because of this, we have taken extreme caution to make sure that decisions are made by those without a conflict of interest. In fact, Hatoun has taken a two-week hiatus from the news department to avoid any conflicts. Unfortunately, we cannot control the perceptions. In the long run, if you would like to criticize anyone for conflict of interest or unethical behavior, the Thresher is not the correct party.
And the more mundane policies:
* Any student can write a letter.
* We print over 80 percent of the letters we receive.
* We print almost 100 percent of the letters we receive from the Rice community. The only letters we don't print are because of space limitations, a repetitive argument that has been expressed in another letter or an irrelevant topic to Rice readers.
* It is Thresher policy not to disguise letters written by staff members as letters to the editor. By making all items written by staff members into opinion columns, the Thresher tries to inform the student body that a staff member is writing. Thus, we avoid ethics allegations from the community. Apparently, this backfired.
* The content was not libelous as it was attacking organizations and public figures. Also, the content was purely opinion. It was not supposed to be taken as fact. The column enjoys protection from a libel suit through the legal principle of fair comment and criticism. This same principle protects the two letters that ran this week in response to Hatoun's column.
* The staff box clearly states that all opinion pieces are the opinion of the author.
* He did not identify himself as a candidate in the article, therefore, he was not campaigning. This same logic was used to decide whether Hatoun had a right of reply to the SA Senate's reply to Hatoun's column. Since the Senate responded to the content of the column and Hatoun as a columnist, it was determined that he did not have a right of reply and the letter was not a vehicle of campaigning.
The decision to hold the two letters in response for a week was based mostly on legal issues. If anyone would like to discuss the intricacies of libel law and the way it applied to this instance, please ask me.
In conclusion, I felt the need to inform the student body as to the situation surrounding this incident while also defending the Thresher from wrongful criticism. I have tried to make the Thresher as open to the student body as possible. After all, the only way to find out what needs to be changed is if our readership tells us. Along that same line, I would appreciate constructive and direct criticism. Criticizing the paper in a meeting and then not telling us of your criticisms does no one any good. The road to improving a collegiate publication is significantly blocked by those people who apply false criticisms to the Thresher staff, or never tell us at all. I congratulate the two authors of the letters in this issue for bringing their criticisms of the paper to the paper. These two letters have forced us to examine our policies and provided a basis for future revisions of policy, if they are needed. I would hope that the rest of the critics of the paper out there would do the same in the future. In the end, we are here to serve you -- the student body. And in taking on that task, we have all pledged the highest level of ethical standards in producing the paper.
-- Charles Klein
1995-96 Co-Editor in Chief of The Rice Thresher
This item appeared in the Opinion section of the February 23, 1996 issue.
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