If you’ve read the news lately, then you’ll know about the problem of the coddling of American students’ minds. Yale students are censoring Halloween costumes, U of Missouri students are restricting the freedom of the press, and just about all student activists have consumed themselves with “victimhood culture” and have become “moral dependents” who rely on “adult authorities to validate their victim status.”

This is a real problem. Except it’s not the only problem. And like with any topic that receives an unusual amount of media attention, it’s important to figure out why this — out of all the problems facing universities today— is currently in the spotlight.

Let’s go back to the September Atlantic cover story that started this entire wave of “colleges are too PC” discussions. Five minutes of research shows that the two authors, Greg Kukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, are not Atlantic writers. Rather, both have personal agendas in writing such a story. Jonathan Haidt is a published author and is now part of an organization called the Heterodox Academy, which is developing a survey to “quantify the degree to which members of an academic community live in fear.” From what, you may ask? The increasingly PC nature of schools, of course.

Greg Lukianoff, more interestingly, is President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE, as it’s called, has been defending the freedom of speech in universities since 1999. While not explicitly a right-wing group, FIRE has received generous funds ($1.4MM) from the Koch brothers. That’s right — this entire media campaign could potentially go as far back as the Koch brothers.

Now back to the student activist groups: Any debate on the merits of these activist groups usually gets lost as the two sides choose polar opposites and the discussion quickly becomes divisive.

I want to make it clear that I think freedom of speech is crucial to the integrity of our democracy. Universities should be intellectual environments of truth and not places where people are afraid to speak of their well-informed opinions. Any activist — at Yale, Mizzou, or elsewhere — who stands against this will not be someone I’m supporting in this post.

But — and this is so incredibly important that I’m shaking as I write this —we cannot forget about the underlying reasons for such student activism by transforming the conversation into one entirely about the coddling of American students. It is simply unacceptable to trivialize student activism that is rooted in real issues, however the media may like to ignore that. Remember in 2014 when an unarmed, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death in Ferguson? That was 100 miles away from U of Missouri. How about Yale’s simple “Halloween problem”? When an African American student is detained at gunpoint for “look[ing] like a burglary suspect” simply after leaving a Yale library, only then do we realize that schools are more entrenched in these issues that we’d like to believe.

Racism is not over. While the media may think it’s more important to devote hundreds of articles to the liberalization of college campuses, while ignoring the root issues fueling such protests, we should all know there are more important things to discuss.

No single person or organization is to blame here. Yes, we have freedom of speech in reporting anything we want. This is how I’m able to write such a post like this one, after all.

This is a collective effort, though. The media may not think the issue of racism in modern universities is relevant or important to discuss, but we the people know that is.

That is why it is up to us to expose the media’s tactic here — one that has been seen time after time in civil rights and other activist movements. If an idea is unsettling to people — and telling the privileged (of which I’m one) that racism still exists is definitely one — then the most dangerous tool the media has is to repurpose the discussion to one of their liking.

As Malcolm X put it so nicely: “The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”

Next time an article appears on a student activist movement, ask yourself: what is the real story here?