Critique

The Maine Campus posted an article on their website on the 27th of January about further information of the University Stabbing incident: Student Accused of Stabbing Released from Jail. Throughout this article there were a multitude of quotes from Penobscot County District Attorney Christopher Almy. This article although supposedly was intended to give more insight and information on Saturday’s stabbing, did nothing more than bash Greek life in the one-sided argument. This article only portrayed one view point: Greeks are bad. Although quotes from Dean Dr. Robert Dana were used to help show the other end of the argument, there were sufficiently less quotes then by the District Attorney. It also showed below the title of the article: DA: Fraternities are “totally out of control”. As a journalist, reporting a story should have both parts of the story/ argument covered. Unfortunately, the article reported by William Davis, focuses on one viewpoint, without giving the other side a chance to defend themselves. As for the specific quotes that were used is slightly bad judgment of the reporter’s part. If a journalist is going to use a quote from a source, the quote should have an amount of support following it. Unfortunately, the quotes used seemed to be very misguided and only words spoken from someone who has something against Greek life. The article focused more on bashing the Greek System at UMaine rather than talking about the situation at hand, a stabbing. Just because the incident occurred outside of a fraternity house and the accused was a fraternity brother does not make this whole situation a fraternity of Greek issue. The incident is an individual issue which the article did not convey, it tried to put the incident on all of Greek life instead of what the true issue was.

Even though there was a poor representation of two different sides of the story, and the reporter
only focused on the bad, there were positive points to the article. The reporter did make the important points in the article about the stabbing, including the vital points of the arraignment, the perpetrators bail conditions and more information on the victims condition.

Legal and Moral issues in Journalism

The first amendment states that we have the right to free speech and press, but its seems that the media is always caught up in whether an issue is going to cause legal and moral issues. A big question is if the Government should have some control over the media and press.

Libel is defamation in written word. Seditious Libel is the same but is defaming the Church or State. The John Peter Zenger case was a famous seditious libel case. Zenger was imprisoned after making critical comments against the colonial government. He was acquitted after ten months. Now, we have The Sedition Act of 1798, which allowed the truth as the defense against a libel case.

Seditious libel and the Zenger case are good examples on why the government shouldn't have much to do with media and press. If government was allowed to control the press things that may be important may not be printed because it posed a bad image for them.

About Me

My name is Hannah and I am a second year mass communications major. I am a proud memeber of Delta Zeta Sorority. I am from the small town of Readfield, Maine, but enjoy living up in Orono now.

I am interested in journalism/mass communications because I think I want to work in PR. My dream job is working PR for the Red Sox!