Discerning fact from fiction
By Jack Gillum
Many college papers unfairly become lightning rods.
That's especially true among the student readers we serve. The bubble of Santa Clara holds in a nocuous amount of rumors, distortions and flat-out lies. It's particularly hard to be a watchdog when some students don't want one in the first place.
Journalists have an essential responsibility to decipher fact from fiction. That's not a job solely reserved for the White House press corps, either. It also applies to a college campus, even one as small as Santa Clara's.
Take athletic trainer Jeannine Masch, for example. I've heard countless stories on what "really happened" the night she died of alcohol poisoning. Some are even too ridiculous to share here.
The Santa Clara, as it should have, seized an opportunity to set the record straight and look deeper into the story. Our staff -- Ãmyself included -- spent weeks doing reporting and tedious, line-by-line editing. Amid the "no comments" and some angry resistance, we discovered a story far more complex than a trainer taking too many shots.
In fact, what we really found was that there were more questions than answers. What does this say about students' cavalier attitudes toward alcohol use? Are there future dangers that both undergraduates and administrators fail to act upon? And how come Masch's death has been so woefully ignored by the university?
Some readers complained. They argued our coverage should have been put to rest in September with our first issue. Or that we shouldn't have written about Masch in the first place.
Those are legitimate complaints, I suppose, if readers ignore the context and impact of what happened. Journalism (to borrow my old professor's analogy) is supposed to look at the horizon. If all we saw was an athletic trainer who drank too much, it may hardly receive the same attention.
Others didn't want to see such a sad story retold. That's not surprising, since many publications on campus (like FYI and Santa Clara Magazine) almost always focus on the good.
Of course, happy stories are important for readers. But the unhappy get far less attention here -- even if, in reality, they matter much, much more.
Our reporting isn't meant to posthumously embarrass Masch, but rather to remember her by asking tough questions of everyone. Refusing to investigate issues that others find offensive avoids highlighting some very ugly pockets of campus life.
If we do that, we fail our readers. We fail the community. And we fail Jeannine.
Jack Gillum is Editor in Chief of The Santa Clara. Contact him at (408) 554-4849 or jgillum@scu.edu.