OUR VIEW: Overreaction also breaks that law

The copy of The Utah Statesman you have in your hands didn’t cost you a dime, right? You picked it up, free of charge, from one of the many racks around campus or off the floor of a table in the Hub or even off the floor of a classroom.

All of us at The Statesman love to see people picking up the paper. What we don’t love is when people, for whatever reason, are stealing newspapers and disposing of them to keep other students from reading what adorns the pages. That sounds a lot like the suppression of our First Amendment freedoms – of speech, of the press.

And when we say stealing, you didn’t misread, we meant stealing. It is, in fact, a crime to steal newspapers, even if they are free. It is the theft and destruction of Utah State property and people have gone to court over this type of thing before.

That’s why it was so troubling for us at The Statesman to find out that persons, who, according to eye witnesses, were wearing Greek Week T-shirts, were stealing and disposing of copies of Wednesday’s paper. The Statesman has filed an official complaint with ASUSU and a full story on the incident is pending, but we felt it important to come out in this issue against such behavior.

We understand this is another case of the extreme action of a few tainting the moderate, sensible responses of the majority of the constituent group – in this case, the Greeks. We know the majority of the Greek community, once alerted to these actions, did not or would not condone such behavior.

That doesn’t, however, change the fact that these few reacted in a wildly inappropriate and illegal manner to The Statesman’s theme section on Greeks.

It’s not our place to speculate about what exactly caused the reaction – a misreading, or misunderstanding – but in no way can we disregard the action or stand idly by while laws are broken and our Constitutional rights are trampled upon.

Incidents like Wednesday’s happen across the country, even at the University of Utah in 2005, when 8,500 copies of The Daily Utah Chronicle were lifted from stands on the campus. In 2003, students at the University of California at Berkeley were arrested and charged with theft for stealing and trashing thousands of copies of The Daily Californian. Stealing free newspapers is considered theft.

And it should be. Those who steal newspapers rob their fellow students of the chance to read, be informed or maybe even entertained by The Statesman or any other paper. It curtails the open exchange of information and opinion. It suppresses freedom of expression.

No matter your feelings about this newspaper, it isn’t right or appropriate to steal and destroy your fellow students’ ability to read it and the writers’ ability to express their opinion – whether that writer is on staff or the author of a column or a letter to the editor. If you do have a complaint, give us feedback, write a letter to the editor.

The saddest part is, in their attempt to keep students from reading whatever story it was, those who stole and destroyed the papers also kept people from seeing an advertisement for the Greek community’s upcoming step show. That ad was paid for by Greeks, so it seems like a waste of money to just throw those dollars into the trash before anyone gets to see the ad.

We feel bad for the majority of the Greek community who had their ads relegated to the waste bin, so, here’s a little free advertising: The 8th annual step show is tonight, 7 to 9 p.m., in the Sunburst Lounge.