Editorial: The Pitt News rejects SGB’s media guidelines

Pitt’s Student Government Board has faced significant scrutiny by on-campus media over the past few weeks.

After two weeks of high-frequency SGB coverage following a contentious Elections Code revision process and a story in The Pitt News that revealed six of the nine SGB members as Druids, Board President Gordon Louderback responded to the increased attention last Tuesday by opening SGB’s final public meeting of the semester with a personal statement. Rather than welcoming the 75 or so attendees of the unusually well-attended meeting, Louderback declared before the audience that The Pitt News story revealing himself and five other Board members as initiates of a secret society was “inaccurate” and a waste of the Board’s time and attention. He asked the student body to not become caught up in what he called the false allegations and invited those with questions or concerns to email him or visit him during his weekly office hours on the eighth floor of the William Pitt Union.

This wasn’t the final time during last week’s public meeting that fair, simple questions were relegated to private office hours. When about 10 students stood up to criticize the Board during the open-floor portion of the meeting for issues ranging from off-base priorities to their affiliation with the Druids, Louderback, Board members and even SGB committee chairs repeatedly told perturbed students that their concerns would be better addressed during office hours than during a public meeting.

Yet shortly before the SGB meeting, The Pitt News and WPTS-FM, Pitt’s student-run radio station, received an email detailing media guidelines that campus media organizations were to adhere to. The guidelines, which weren’t sent to larger media outlets such as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette or the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, state that reporters looking to talk to a member of SGB must check in with a secretary at the front desk of his or her office and be invited in by the Board member they wish to speak with. The guidelines also established an “open-door” policy, precluding SGB affiliates from holding closed-door meetings with reporters within the Board offices.

According to Louderback, the guidelines were decided upon and voted in unanimously by the Board in a private meeting, and Kenyon Bonner, Pitt’s director of Student Life and SGB’s liaison, told the Board it was within Board members’ purview to establish them. Louderback commented that these policies were decided upon by the Board to make interviews more public.

Seem a little contradictory? That’s because it is. On the very same day, the Board cordially requested that more students attend office hours and only hours before attempted to limit campus media employees from exercising the same right. Furthermore, members of the Board claimed to have done so in the interest of making interviews more public, but when presented with opportunity after opportunity to respond to questions in the most public forum available at their Tuesday night meeting, they declined. Not once and not casually, but repeatedly and with insistence.

Board members themselves gave us several other justifications for the new media policies. Board member C.J. Bonge said they resulted from confusion and inconsistency among Board members as to what each was saying to the press. Board member Mike Nites noted that, if a reporter and Board member desired a closed-door conversation, they could simply hold it somewhere other than the SGB offices to avoid creating “uncomfortable issues” among the Board members. Board member Amelia Brause presented the guidelines as a common courtesy, stating that Board members deserved to feel “ready and comfortable” when being approached by reporters.

But we don’t believe it’s the responsibility of the media to ensure the comfort of the leaders or to ease unpleasant tensions among them. Forcing reporters to check in and then depriving them of the opportunity to speak privately with SGB members in the office is a clear act of censorship, and worse, it’s an intimidation tactic to discourage Board members from expressing dissenting points of view to the media. When consulted on the issue, Frank LoMonte, the director of the Student Press Law Center, called the guidelines issued by SGB, “without precedent at any institution of higher education.”

Being a public figure, such as a member of SGB, necessitates dealing with uncomfortable situations in a professional manner, and barring media from private discussions in the SGB office constitutes an immature and inappropriate reaction to a higher-than-usual level of public scrutiny. Rather than stepping up to face accusations and dispel the suspicion and declining trust that has recently surrounded it, the Board has chosen instead to bury its head further in the sand.

The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that anonymous speech — including speaking to a reporter with the door closed — is protected speech. Pitt’s administration has the final say over decisions SGB makes, and Chancellor Mark Nordenberg should not allow Pitt’s undergraduate student government to maintain the kind of policy that clearly violates constitutionally guaranteed rights.

The Pitt News refuses now, and will refuse in the future, to comply with this policy, especially in regard to the open-door requirement. SGB’s guidelines do nothing less than stifle free speech and the circulation of ideas among the student body, and they could allow Board members to intimidate each other into continuing to present a united — and decidedly unforthcoming — front.