This is the first of a three-part series of columns.

Well, you asked for it.

It’s one thing when you talk about an organization privately with colleagues or express your frustration with your coverage in the student newspaper. It’s something entirely different when you talk about it while you’re giving a tour of IU Southeast to prospective students or anyone else.

A member of the Student Government Association gave such a tour a couple of weeks ago and made such a comment about how we’ve covered their organization in the past. I don’t go around talking about how little I’ve seen Student Government do for the students in First Year Seminar classes. I’d expect the same kind of courtesy from them.

Let’s talk for a second about how I’ve covered SGA since Nov. 13, 2006: I sat through more than two years of senate meetings, took notes about their legislation and wrote quotes during the meetings. Also, I always gave members of SGA an opportunity to comment after the gavel struck to adjourn.

I was more than fair in my coverage of their business meetings. If they said something during or after the meeting to make them look like fools, or discuss a bill with little or no point, any coverage perceived as negative was hardly my doing.

If a member of the senate acted inappropriately or violated their own constitution, it was my duty to include those events in my reports. These are, after all, people who spend some of the money every student pays at the beginning of every semester. They should be held accountable for their actions and responsible for the consequences, just as I should.

Rather than complaining about how you think you’re being portrayed in The Horizon, start paying attention to what’s being written. Taking action on what you are or aren’t doing is going to improve student perception of your group better than trying to convince people outside of the university how our coverage really isn’t your fault.

As a matter of professionalism, I’ve never written an opinion piece about the organization while I was actively covering them. I didn’t cross that line because I knew it was a conflict of interest and I didn’t want to add any kind of color to my coverage. It was the fair thing to do.

Bad-mouthing any student organization or department on campus while giving a university-sponsored tour is more than unprofessional, it’s absolutely distasteful. Even if I completely disagreed with anything SGA did while I covered them, I held my tongue in public settings.

I kept covering SGA as a matter of principle: Decisions were being made about how to spend student money and that was important enough to make sure we had the SGA story in every issue of The Horizon. Whether they think the coverage helped or hurt them, I extended every professional courtesy.

You want negative? Here it comes.

By JEROD CLAPP
Señor Editor
jlclapp@ius.edu