In last issue, we ran a story about the racist graffiti written all over the campus. We also ran a photo of those hateful and ignorant statements to let the readers understand what was going on.

As a student newspaper, we felt this story newsworthy and worthy of your attention. The only way to make change is to be informed about these issues and how they affect us as a student body.

There was deliberation on whether we should run this shocking image or hide it from your view. We, in turn, asked our adviser, who has experience at major newspapers and understands the ethics behind news decisions making. His advice, which we took, was to run the photo in order to inform the students about what is occurring on this campus.

We thought there wouldn’t be any backlash to the paper, but instead to the vandal.

This was untrue. A letter sent to the Communicator by Victor Bray, the Vice President of the African American Association, stated the article appeared to “promote racism” We understand these words and images are a sensitive subject and can be offensive. But we feel these are newsworthy subjects.

If this is true that we promoted racism, then all the “our views” we have written in the past about equality would be lies. Also, if this logic is correct, then all the news coverage and pictures about 9/11 would be promoting terrorism instead of keeping the nation up to date on the issue.

Not only did the letter accuse the paper of promoting racism, but also its author asked us to inform his association of any racial issues that we wanted to run in the newspaper. This will not happen because it interferes with our rights as student journalists. If we allowed people to choose what they wanted in the newspaper, then there would be no news.

Any person with an agenda could make a paper print what ever they wanted. This would take away your right to be informed.

There will never be a change in our policy as a paper about bringing the news, no matter how painful it can be. Without a doubt, we will not allow people to give us the OK to print an article.

We believe you deserve the right to get the news no matter how offensive and disgusting the topic can be.