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Media no place for government
By Mike Lauterbach
 Mike Lauterbach -- Reader´s Advocate
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Before this year's Super Bowl, I never knew that marijuana could get me pregnant.
So, concerned for my safety, I visited the Office of National Drug Policy's Web site for more information.
It turns out that marijuana could also make me run over small children on bicycles ("marijuana affects your reaction time") and could even make me blow my own head off ("marijuana can distort your sense of reality"). Then there's the TV ad that infers that dope buyers were somehow responsible for the 9-11 attacks.
So much for eating some Cheetos, complaining about Bush awhile and falling asleep on the couch.
No one I know defends these multi-million dollar scare tactics. But when Student Government pulled a similar stunt (albeit with a slightly lower budget), publicizing the falsification was somehow "clearly an attack on students."
A couple of weeks ago, my Criminal Law professor taught our class something he called a "stew meat argument." It went something like this: You bring home some stew meat for your family. You open up the meat, and there's a spot of spoiled, rotting meat right in the middle of your chunk of stew meat. Even though the rest of the meat looks fine on the outside, are you going to cut out the spoiled chunk and serve the rest, or are you going to throw the whole thing out?
From here on out, a lot of folks are going to be throwing out a good deal of what Student Government has to say. And Student Government doesn't have anyone to blame but itself.
There's a simple solution to this--a better one than "Student Government shouldn't take quotes out of context." Government in general (and Student Government specifically) needs to bow out of the media business entirely.
There was no reason in the world why campus political parties and activist organizations couldn't have gotten together and put up some posters giving students a reason to go to Lobby Day. Even if those posters had said something like, "Laura King says campus will be destroyed by a giant T-Rex if you don't go to Lobby Day," at least they wouldn't have gone to the credibility of SCSU in general.
In the same way, drug ads trying to make a connection between pot and teen pregnancy would have gone over a lot better had concerned citizen groups raised money for them. In the end, the most objectionable thing about them to me was that I helped put them there.
Interest groups have always tried to influence public policy, and rightfully so. But mixing into public policy debates has never been the role of government on any level. There's no reason that should change now.
Mike Lauterbach can be reached at
[email protected]
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