Why Won’t Catholic Outreach Talk to the Media?

When The Warrior did a quite favorable feature on Catholic student organizations on the Marquette campus, one organization was conspicuously missing: Catholic Outreach.

Since Catholic Outreach is a project of the University Ministry, this was a rather glaring omission.

But the reason for the omission was explained in a column by Mike Rudzinski, Warrior editor.

It seems we weren’t the only student-run organization asking the question [who are we?]. This issue, we focus on Catholic leaders on campus who ask the tough questions: “who are you Marquette, and what is your true mission?” Go Roman Week sought out the soul of Marquette as a Catholic, Jesuit institution.

The answer to our paper’s own identity search came while investigating this week’s feature story. Catholic Outreach, a university sponsored Catholic organization, wanted to be included in the story but was unable to do so without university approval. University Ministry needed to review our questions and approve the article before it could be published.

This contradicts our journalistic code of ethics. As students, as Americans, as human beings we all have the right to speak freely without censorship. As an independent publication and voice of the student body, The Warrior refuses to be censored, and so should you.

We quickly established that what Rudzinski says about attempted censorship is accurate -- or at least, it correctly reflects what The Warrior was told when it tried to do an interview.

Wanting to get to the bottom of this, we yesterday phoned Ann Mulgrew, the University Ministry staffer who oversees Catholic Outreach. She said she was unaware of this situation, and would get back to us.

We also attempted to reach three officers of the organization: Riad el-Azem, Aaron Morey and Rebecca Baehrend.

Two of the three failed to respond to our multiple e-mail and voice mail messages. The third talked briefly, giving evasive and apparently disingenuous answers before terminating the interview.

We called Ann Mulgrew back today, and she was extremely huffy, objecting to the fact that we had tried to reach the officers of the group. Some, she said, had contacted her to “complain.” Apparently, in her view, journalists should accept the “authoritative” view of events that she hands out, and not try to develop independent sources.

In other words, she inadvertently reinforced the impression that the whole Warrior affair gave.

She then refused to talk further. It seemed to us that she was using a contrived grievance to evade answering embarrassing questions about University Ministry policies.

This raises some serious questions about the University Ministry, and about the bureaucratic culture there.

• Why are they so fearful about letting students speak? They, after all, constituted Catholic Outreach and chose the officers. Why don’t they trust their own student officers?
• Why are the student officers so fearful of the University Ministry? Why do they consent to be censored?
• Why the mania on the part of University Ministry to control information? They claim to want to prevent “inaccurate” information from getting out. But in the minds of bureaucrats obsessed with control, “inaccurate” is likely to equal “information that reflects badly on us.”

The truth, of course, is that if you let people speak freely, some will say inaccurate things, some will say dumb things and some things will be misreported.

Apparently in a couple of past instances, Catholic Outreach officers have gone a bit too far and said things that the University Ministry thought to be out of line.

That’s the risk anybody operating in the public arena takes. Why does the University Ministry think different rules apply to them?

The University Ministry is, at least nominally, a Christian operation. So it ought to be known for speaking truthfully and speaking boldly. Instead, it seems to be a haven for risk-averse bureaucrats.

And the ethos has infected the students in the organization’s orbit.

Street Beacon Out Tomorrow

Barring any last minute glitches -- like snow or rain -- look for the second issue of the Street Beacon out tomorrow.

Update:

The paper was for sale on Tuesday morning, as planned. When we walked by the Raynor Library at about 10:00 a.m. Editor Matt Ryno, a fellow student and two homeless guys were selling it.

We bought two copies from one of the homeless guys.

We may have more to say about the issue later, but it’s obvious that the staff has produced quite a good paper.

Online Newspaper at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

We passed on posting about the first issue, but it now has to be noticed.

Front Page Milwaukee is an online project of journalism students at UWM, and the Faculty Supervisor is Jessica McBride, blogger and talk show host on WTMJ.

McBride explains:

I am the editor-in-chief of this paper, which is produced by students at UW-Milwaukee’s Journalism and Mass Communication Department. Many of the stories and columns are produced in classes. The paper launched today. The goal of the paper is to enrich the public debate by providing stories that aren’t being told elsewhere. The paper also will offer a rich mixture of opinion voices. You can find everything from liberal to conservative voices in this paper, and everything in between.

Our first response is “wait a minute, this isn’t a student paper!”

Our second thought is: “students do reporting for journalism classes, why shouldn’t their work appear on the web?”

We have served as a source for countless reporting assignments in Marquette journalism classes which never appeared in any public venue. Some of this probably resulted in “C” grades -- so nothing was lost. But some probably deserved a wider audience.

The UWM journalism students appear to have done some pretty decent muckraking in their first two issues, revealing quite questionable spending by local school districts, and the criminal records of Milwaukee city cops.

The web-only format is clearly the wave of the future, given that the circulation of print newspapers is steadily declining, while the readership of the web (including the web sites of traditional papers) is headed upward.

When Marquette students founded The Warrior, they chose to go with the now-traditional pattern of a print newspaper with an online version essentially identical to the print edition. This certainly has advantages. But web technology has radically reduced barriers to entry in journalistic enterprises.

Are there faculty or students at Marquette who should follow the lead of the public university across town?