Change Star

Last Friday, the voice of discontent sounded and it was like sweet music to my ears. To the editors of the Star, as students of this university and as members of the NIU community, we deserve better service than you are providing. The Star presents falsehoods as truths; it reports speculations as facts; it greets serious issues with inappropriately biting sarcasm, and it provides a medium for racist advertising. Let us not forget its acceptance of an advertisement by a neo-Nazi, anti-semitic, propagandist who seeks to discredit the validity of the Jewish Holocaust. What’s next? Will it run a deceitful ad sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan or a facet thereof? Maybe not, but the door has certainly been opened.

The Star has disparagingly targeted the black community with negatively biased studies, headlines, and editorials. If these stories were not lethally laced with false data and subjective speculation that serve to misrepresent our community, our objection would not be so fervent.

Last Thursday, I attended the editors’ forum. Along with other members of the NIU community, we posed a simple question to the editors. We asked for steps toward reasonable and effective change. Eric Krol, with a condescending personsa, arrogantly denied our requests and self-righteously dismissed our concerns.

Therefore, I am offering this suggestion to the leaders of a movement to express our discontent. We must seek to clean up this mess from within. Some contend that we can threaten the viability of the Star if we take away our financial support. I disagree. We will have only given up our rights to protest this biased publication. Without our patronage the Star will simply seek to increase its outside sponsorship. In fact, it is entirely reasonable that the paper will further its inclusion of sponsorship by white-supremacist segments of our environment. Then the problem will have only worsened.

I would like to see leaders of minority organizations encourage our best delegates to represent our concerns by writing for the Star. Send a lot of them. Find students who have the talent, time and conviction and support them in their effort to support us. The Star is a student-run organization and they cannot deny you. Journalism majors would be ideal candidates. We might even insist that reporters for the Lifeline publication be provided with a guest editorial spot in the Star. This is our paper too and how it reports will affect us for as long as it is viable. We are members of the talented tenth that W.E.B. Dubois spoke of and we can empower ourselves in order to facilitate change.

Walter Farr

Graduate Student

Business