For the third time in a year and a half, copies of The Ball State Daily News were stolen from locations across campus.
We hope most of campus realizes how wrong and illegal this is.
Stealing is a crime, regardless of the cost of what you're stealing.
Printing costs alone were more than $1,000 but that doesn't account for the money advertisers put into it or the long, hard hours the editorial and advertising staffs worked.
At other campuses across the country, student-run, free newspapers have been stolen and the perpetrators have been fined or put in jail.
In 2006 at Stetson University in Florida a student newspaper printed a story about a sorority house having mold in it. According to the Student Press Law Center, a member of the sorority admitted to stealing the papers later that month and the group paid the newspaper $1,200 to recoup the cost of the lost papers.When people who steal newspapers are found, they are punished. Police are called and reports are filed.
If you want to boycott the Daily News, feel free. Don't read it, don't look at it.
You can participate in a peaceful protest outside our office.
You can voice your opinion in the Daily News and on comment boards. You can write a letter to the editor or a guest column.
That's the purpose of the Forum page; use it.
However, Friday morning's behavior is inexcusable.
If you think we're biased in our coverage, look back through the years. We've covered the good and bad of everything on campus.
We cover Watermelon Bust, Arrow Games, Water Daze and countless other greek philanthropies. However, we also cover the greek organizations when unsavory things are going on with their chapters, such as members being removed and arrested.
We cover athletics routinely. In the Forum section, we tried to muster spirit to get people to go to the International Bowl. We cover individuals who are exceptional players on the team. We also cover athletes who get arrested.
Every Thursday we print the names of each person who was arrested by the Ball State University Police Department and what they were arrested for.
We wrote a full, front-page story about a Daily News alumnus who was arrested for punching a tow-truck driver.
We cover the campus, we cover the students and we do it everyday.
If you don't like what we do, speak out against it.
But nobody has the right to steal.
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