{"id":37685,"date":"2018-02-13T01:30:53","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T06:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=37685"},"modified":"2018-02-13T01:30:53","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T06:30:53","slug":"journalistic-malpractice-and-byu-idaho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2018\/02\/journalistic-malpractice-and-byu-idaho\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalistic Malpractice and BYU-Idaho"},"content":{"rendered":"

First the journalistic malpractice, then BYU-Idaho.<\/p>\n

Not long ago the Salt Lake Tribune ran a headline so egregiously inaccurate that it constitutes journalistic malpractice: \u201cAs a new Women of Color club provides a \u2018sanctuary\u2019 at Brigham Young University in Provo, its Idaho campus has shut down such groups<\/a>.\u201d The only logical interpretation of the headline is that there were clubs providing sanctuary for women of color at BYU-Idaho, but BYU-Idaho has shut them down.<\/p>\n

This is simply untrue. There never have been such clubs at BYU-Idaho. The university\u2019s student cultural associations were for men and women of all backgrounds (and not, as the article incorrectly states, for students of a particular heritage) who were interested in international cultures. One may well believe that BYU-Idaho should<\/em> offer clubs for women of color, but that such clubs were targeted for closing is a figment of the headline writer\u2019s imagination. The headline recklessly suggests racist and sexist intent that the following article does not substantiate. This is the type of lazy headline writing that breeds mistrust of serious media outlets. For people concerned about racism, sexism, and the erosion of trust in media, news stories that promise but don\u2019t deliver do a real disservice.<\/p>\n

Another level of journalistic malpractice is that the article entirely misses the actual story.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

When I taught at BYU-Idaho, I helped students organize an academic society, and then, when the students determined that a cultural association was a better fit for their goals, they reformed as one of those. The difference between the two, as far as I could tell, was that academic societies needed a faculty advisor, while cultural associations didn\u2019t, and academic societies were supposed to have a narrower academic or career focus, and there were some restrictions on approved activities. As a language teacher, I appreciated how having a cultural association made it easy for my students to hold fun, low-stress cultural activities outside of class, and especially how the university made it easy it to schedule facilities and hold events. If I were still teaching there, I would be highly disturbed to lose that. A language club is one of the first things you try to set up alongside a language program, and at BYU-Idaho it was working quite well. For languages not represented in the curriculum, the cultural associations were the only way for international students, returned missionaries, and other interested students to maintain cultural engagement on even a basic level in some official way on campus. And for communication, publicity, organizing, and other fundamental concerns, having an official campus identity is absolutely essential.<\/p>\n

But whether what BYU-Idaho has done is trivial or awful depends on answers to questions that the Tribune article never asks. Questions like:<\/p>\n