LETTER: Statesman missed story

Editor,

There was a front page article in the Herald Journal about an incident at the Sigma Nu fraternity house after the HOWL this weekend. I was surprised that I had not read about the same incident in The Statesman on Monday since surely there must have been some of The Statesman staff at the party where the incident occurred. The Journal reported that this incident was large enough that it took four police departments to break it up, so I imagine that someone from The Statesman staff had at least heard about it. I gave The Statesman staff the benefit of the doubt, thinking that the news just happened after The Statesman had already gone to press and it was too late to make the Monday edition. Then I remembered the “Our View” editorial from Monday’s paper lamenting (as happens every year) how standard (and enjoyable) the HOWL was again. Any way I look at it, it seems that whoever wrote the editorial, if indeed it was a fair evaluation of the HOWL to do so from the time the HOWL ended to the time that Monday’s edition went to press, the exact interval when the frat house situation occurred. So my question is, given the evidence that there was time for a report of the incident to make the papers, why was The Statesman unwilling to run an article on it? Why is The Statesman willing to give blame to STAB for a boring HOWL but unwilling to give the Sigma Nu fraternity bad press by reporting on the “riot” (in the words of the Herald Journal)?

James Jacobson