By Josh Attaway, Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity president/music business senior
After reading this week’s front-page article about fraternity rush, there were some major concerns that I noticed as well as ones that were brought to me by other people and as the president of Lambda Chi Alpha, I feel it is my duty to relay those concerns to the ones responsible for the article. When I was approached about doing an interview for an article, I was put under the impression that this would be an article talking about IFC rush as a whole and how it went this year. When I met with the editor-in-chief, Amanda Alfanos, to give an interview, I answered numerous questions explaining that the success of our rush is not based on how many guys we give bids to or how many guys take bids, but rather is based on the quality of those men and their character. I explained about how we look for our seven core values in guys and the process that we go through when deciding who to give bids to, yet none of this was mentioned in the article. After a 15-minute interview of talking about the positives of our recruitment class and how proud we were of those guys and how happy we were with our rush, there was only one quote that was taken out of context of all of that and used in a way to portray our fraternity in a negative way making it sound as though our rush was a failure. Out of a full front-page article that was supposed to be about IFC rush, there were three sentences that talked about Lambda Chi Alpha’s rush and all three were used in a way to make our fraternity sound anything but positive and that is very concerning to me. About half of the article was talking about how great Kappa Sigma’s rush was and how they are such an outstanding chapter (which they are, do not get me wrong), but nothing was mentioned about how our chapter was one of two chapters selected this year for a special Inner Circle training out of 196 chapters internationally, putting us in the top 1 percent. The other half of the article was talking about how great of an opportunity FIJI is for guys on this campus (and again don’t get me wrong, it is an excellent opportunity), but there was nothing talking about the positives of Lambda Chi Alpha. Finally, there was a picture that took up about a quarter of the front page of a sign that said “I Love Kappa Sigma,” yet there were no pictures of anything about Lambda Chi Alpha, and I know that there was a photographer taking pictures that morning at our house so I know that those pictures were available. If your objective as a campus newspaper is to present an unbiased story, then I am afraid that in the eyes of many you have failed on this one. Using quotes like “Despite Kappa Sigma’s greater recruitment numbers, IFC rush was a success…” shows complete biased towards one group and you will lose much support on this campus by alienating yourself from other groups and as an active member and supporter of this university I want nothing but success for every aspect of this university and its students. The fact that I had members of Kappa Sigma fraternity calling me after this article was published wanting to apologize because even they felt that it was biased and slanted their way, I believe says something powerful about the article. I, as well as many others, feel that a formal editorial apology is due to Lambda Chi Alpha, and that our fraternity deserves to have our positive attributes given just as much attention as anyone else on this campus.
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