Our View: Clarification and Communication

We would like to thank you for reading The Utah Statesman. We would also like to thank those who take time to reach out and let us know what they think about our content. We take feedback and criticism seriously.

Last Friday, we published a story about an anonymous email sent to The Utah Statesman that provided screenshots of messages from the Slack and Snapchat communication channels of a USU fraternity. These messages included sexual innuendos, remarks and jokes. We stand by our decision to publish this story. Everything in it is factually true, and everything subjective expressed in the story is attributed to a source. After receiving your feedback, we realized we needed to include more information in the original article, and clarification has been added to the online story about the screenshots we received.

To clarify further, the poll screenshot included in the story was one of seven screenshots we received. We chose to use this screenshot in the story because it was one of the least explicit. Other screenshots had remarks that were much more vulgar, which we were not comfortable putting into the newspaper. This was not clear enough in the original article, and it’s been updated to reflect this. 

Because we send our paper to print on Thursday nights, we were not able to utilize the feedback in the printed article and make those adjustments, but the changes were made to the online article Friday evening.

We also received feedback about the use of terms like “toxic masculinity” and “rape culture.” We want to note that these were the words used by our sources, and what is said by our sources does not reflect the opinion of the Statesman. None of our articles should ever reflect the opinion of the reporter, which is why everything in the article is attributed to a source. We are always grateful for sources, and we thank Amanda DeRito, Cole Lancaster and Coleton Richmond for taking the time to help us inform the community.

The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics encourages journalists to “explain ethical choices and processes to audiences.” 

The first tenet of the Code of Ethics is to Seek Truth and Report It. We stand by this story because everything in it is true, our sources are identified, we allowed the subjects of the coverage to respond to the story, and it prompted an open exchange of views. When we realized more context was needed in the story, we updated it.

Several messages of feedback cited the second tenet of the Code of Ethics, to Minimize Harm. This tenet advises journalists to minimize harm, not to avoid harm completely — because that’s impossible. Under this tenet, the Code of Ethics says, “Realize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention.” 

We chose to identify those who voted in the poll because we wanted to hold them accountable as members of a student organization within the Student Involvement and Leadership Center, especially the individuals who hold positions of power and represent students’ interests at USU.

Regardless of your personal thoughts on the vulgarity of the jokes, we believe messages like this are not appropriate in any communication channel for organizations within Student Involvement. Though the subject matter of this story may not seem newsworthy to everyone, someone was concerned enough about the way members of this fraternity were talking in their communication channels to reach out to us about it.

We encourage student organizations to take time to set a clear standard of what is and is not appropriate in communication between members, and we encourage everyone to be more mindful of the way they interact with others in university settings and communication channels.

If you’re curious about what else is included in the SPJ Code of Ethics, you can read the full code here.

If you are dissatisfied with our work, we do want to hear about it. We hope you’ll also reach out when we write things you like. The best place to direct feedback is to the reporter themselves or to our managing editor at editor@usustatesman.com.

If you ever feel the need to write a response to something we publish, we are always taking submissions for letters to the editor and pitches for guest columns. You can find more information about that here.

Thank you for reading the Statesman.

— The Utah Statesman Editorial Board