There are two significant issues that this editorial board repeatedly addresses: campus division and campus apathy.

So when we discovered that a group of students was uniting to protest discrimination on campus, we were excited not only to cover the event as a breaking news story, but also to witness the event itself.

It's about time someone addressed this issue, we thought. It's about time there was a rumble of political action on this campus.

We were not only sympathetic to the group’s cause but also in support of it.

However, Friday's protest quickly shifted from an event challenging campus prejudices to a battle amongst members of the protest group and The Brown and White itself. Members of FBR, the name of the student group that led the protest, blatantly refused to speak with any Brown and White reporter. They even instructed other members of the group to turn their heads away as Brown and White reporters filmed and photographed the protest.

Our job as an objective news source had suddenly become much more complicated. We had set out to report the protest as completely and as fairly as possible, allowing for the voices of both sides of the issue to be heard. What we were left with was two sides – the administration and the protesters – both attempting to control the message. We were forced to report the protest as we witnessed it first hand, without any input from the voices that truly should have been driving the story: those of the protesters themselves.

As we attempted to navigate through the lack of communication and information, we began to receive negative messages and threats from members and affiliates of FBR about our coverage. They attacked us for covering the event objectively, without a bias sympathetic to their cause. They transformed the protest into an "us vs. them," narrowing the conflict to be almost exclusively with The Brown and White.

And in the end, it detracted from the point they were originally trying to make. FBR was protesting on behalf of students who feel marginalized on Lehigh’s campus. They were provoking Lehigh students to think about the divisions among the campus as a whole. They were fighting for greater campus-wide unity.

Yet by restricting The Brown and White from covering their event, by taking a negative attitude toward us, they contradicted their stance. They immediately formed a prejudice against our organization, a prejudice we had done nothing to deserve. The same judgmental attitude they were accusing Lehigh students of was the attitude they took toward us. They alienated The Brown and White reporters in the same way they said the rest of campus was alienating them.

The Brown and White reporters were not the only individuals on campus to feel the heat of FBR's anger on social media Friday afternoon. Other students who expressed confusion about the protest's aims, and who claimed they had never felt discriminated against at Lehigh, were berated for their words. In protesting about not having a voice on campus, FBR was unintentionally restricting the voice of others.

In addition, some of the protesters’ comments made the event into a race issue, even though the duct tape on many of the protesters’ mouths included derogatory terms not associated with race. By bringing race into the picture, members of FBR excluded other groups on campus who feel marginalized for other reasons.

How can you have a protest whose aim is to foster campus-wide unity and not offer every student who feels marginalized a chance to take part? If you push people away yourself, are you not also contributing to the problem?

We, the editorial board of The Brown and White, believe that you cannot have a conversation about campus unity while excluding groups from it. The conversation has to be all-inclusive throughout the campus community.

We are willing to help initiate that dialogue on campus. We want to provide a forum for discussion by covering campus events, including FBR protests, from an objective and unbiased perspective.

But to do that, we cannot be a part of the story ourselves. As the late host of 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace, once said, "I was never the story. The story was the story. Period."

- The Brown and White Editors



