Daily Lobo trades journalism for jokes by failing to investigate

Editor,

I am interested in whether the Daily Lobo staff contains true journalists or just pawns of a large government-run university. I am interested because true journalists would be doing some investigative reporting on the campus employees’ shenanigans.  A quality student-led newspaper would be asking why school employees are trying to kill free enterprise by intimidating and threatening others.  Investigative, free-speech-loving journalists would be writing about the hypocrisy of these people as they harass, intimidate and threaten private businesses off campus.  Quality journalism from future professionals would be focusing on why textbooks are outrageously priced. A newspaper worth being called a newspaper would be asking why a UNM Bookstore employee would go to an off-campus bookstore and threaten the staff there. They would ask why UNM campus police go to these businesses and threaten store owners and why UNM administrators ignore requests for public
information, which is the law under the Inspection of Public Records Act.   

Yet these and many other questions go unanswered.

Last year this newspaper provided survey results that said one of the most important and troubling issues for students at UNM was textbook prices. Yet even as private business seeks to provide an alternative to these outrageous book prices the Daily Lobo stands strangely quiet. Why?

I think the students deserve an answer — an answer to why textbook prices are so high to why employees attempt to intimidate competitors who can save students money, and to why the campus newspaper is focused on comparing Albuquerque to Oklahoma City.  

It certainly is an effective method of distraction to avoid controversial and important topics. Let’s make fun of another city and forget we have a responsibility to seek the truth, provide answers and to serve our readers.

Lobo staff, stop trying to be cute and funny.  

Get out there and find out why the University is dead-set on screwing your friends and is happily gorging itself on your hard-earned dollars. Ask hard questions; don’t take the answers from people of power at face value and dig, dig, dig.  

If you are going to call yourself journalists, start acting like you know what that means.

Gary Rudick
Reader from Oklahoma City