(Eric Frey)
On the weekend of Sept. 15-17, two assaults involving Miami University students occured in Oxford. The Miami Student did not report the assaults for a variety of reasons but had such a story been printed, it would have avoided the racial rhetoric that other local news outlets used in a sensational and irresponsible manner.
The first of these assaults involved about seven suspects, identified as black males, who assaulted two students, neither of whom sought medical treatment despite minor injuries. The second incident involved another group of suspects, identified again as black males, who assaulted a student who was taken to the hospital with a concussion but was later released.
When reporting on crime stories, The Student attempts to provide information necessary to the Miami community. To achieve this, we use criteria similar to the university's criteria for making decisions to release Campus Crime Alerts. If a crime presents a continued threat to the Miami community, then it serves the public interest to report it in order to increase awareness and safety. The crime would also be reported if it were a serious one, such as a felony, or resulted in a serious student injury. The two aforementioned incidents did not to fit into such criteria. While the first assault did have a racial component to it (the assailants shouted racial slurs at the victims) there is no indication that the crime presented a continued danger to the Miami community. The police do not believe there is any link between the two beatings, reinforcing this opinion.
Also, since the beginning of the semester there have been 33 assaults, not including these two incidents, 15 of which involved students. The Student and the university have only reported on one of these 15 crimes, a felonious assault that severely injured a student. Reporting the assault alerted the community and aided in the arrest of a suspect. While the number of suspects and the student injury are possibly newsworthy, local media did not focus on these facts of the recent assaults, but rather seized upon racial factors as the core news value of the assaults and used charged rhetoric such as "police hunt for gangs" and "violent beatings" that lead to startling conclusions.
The injury from the second assault, which was not immediately known to this newspaper, would have changed the circumstances of our decision not to report on the incident. The local media coverage of these stories, however, has been irresponsible and insulting to the university. The Miami Student rejects such poor reporting and will continue to hold itself to a high journalistic standard.
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