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Page 4 University Daily Kansan, August 29, 1980
Opinion
It's about time the federal government got around to investigating the University of Kansas and other colleges' compliance with Title IX in athletic programs.
Title IX study overdue
Although Title IX regulations went into effect in 1975, schools were given a three-year grace period to bring their programs into compliance. Then it took until last December for the new extinct Department of Health, Education and Welfare to issue a final policy interpretation on how it planned to enforce the rules. The three-month-old Education Department only recently completed 152-page manuals for its investigators to use in assessing the programs.
While the bureaucrats have been shuffling their feet, obvious inequities in funding between wcmen's and men's athletic programs have continued here and elsewhere.
At KU, the excuses have been a lack of money and an insufficient understanding of the regulations. But it wasn't a lack of money that prompted complaints two years ago. It was an alleged discriminatory distribution of that money.
It's about time.
The pending investigation should invalidate the equally feeble excuse that the regulations lacked clarity.
Sermon ruffles routine
There's nothing like a fiery oration from a rabid evangelist to make the hot August days hotter—and blessedly less routine.
The University owes preacher George "Jed" Smock a round of applause and a handshake for his stirring performance in front of Flint and Wescow halls this week. For a few minutes or a few hours, as long as they wanted to listen, enrolment-scarred students enjoyed a break from the hassles of a new semester, an island of spontaneity in a sea of schedules.
They also enjoyed a good fight. Religious and nonreligious attacked Smock and his hellfire preaching. Smock was undaunted. The students perspired. Guilt does that to people.
Smock said later that his rhetoric had riot converted any of his listeners but that he was satisfied with his days' work nonetheless. He expected the abuse he received and labeled the hostility as "typical."
Press privacy helps readers
Thanks, Smock, for making the days less so.
BY JOSEPH COOPER
New York Times Special Features
NEW YORK—Journalist—whether armed with pencil and pad or patished audiovisual recording equipment—have the right to report all the news and opinions they can gather. In exercising their freedom they may intrude on others' confidential materials, supposedly secret meetings, memos and discussions. In all but a very few cases, these actions must be considered warranted because, on balance, the public interest is better served by knowledge than by confidence and by providing such persons themselves, by claiming confidentiality of sources, restrict the flow of information.
Just recently, a Boise television news editor, Bob Loy, videotaped portions of an inmate uprising at the Idaho State Penitentiary. It was a small town, and the prison's station's right to use the videotapes. But any kind of news presentation requires editing, and after the segment was aired, the local prosecutor's office wanted to see the unedited footage equivalent of a reporter's notes. Request denied.
THE PROSECUTOR'S office then obtained a warrant to search the station, seized copies of the tapes and, after viewing them, concluded that there was no possible prosecutions might have been deleted.
Thus began a battle of legal technicalities and procedural fine points pitting legitimate law enforcement interests against legitimate news-gathering interests. Just where does the public interest fit in? And How can the press and broadcast media avoid charges that they seem to place their self-interest above the public interest?
The public benefits because access enables the press to scrutinize the judicial process. The presumption is that the press can blow the whistle if corruptions of our judicial system are witnessed; that it can weed out incompetence in the judiciary and transform it to. Furthermore, the public benefits by having favorable or prejudicial judicial treatment reported.
BUT CERTAIN prosecutors suspect reporters of being biased and consider them to be uncooperative. Members of the public may wonder about what goes on between journalists and their confidential sources and about how the press and other media can insist upon access to information in others' files and refuse access to their own files.
That there is not a complementary right of access in the public (through the prosecutor's office) to reporters' notes and to camera crews' footage is neither an oversight nor an inconsistency. More information, not less, is the result. More penetrating analysis and more significant exposes are the benefit. The public interest is better served by journalists who can bring forth information that would not otherwise be disclosed to authorities, who are not in a position to respect requests for confidentiality or anonymity.
It can be argued that inmates creating serious problems at a prison should not be afforded the same anonymity (and thus immunity) as others who share confidence with the media. But it cannot be denied that the citizens of Idaho will learn more about the troubles at their state penitentiary only because some prisoners thought a particular television reporter was involved in open-minded—neither armed with nor likely to be compromised by law enforcementpeople.
THERE WILL BE those who consider Loy's claim of First Amendment protection unfounded or inappropriate. Some will equate his intransigence with the obstruction of justice. But what kind of justice is achieved through betrayal?
There is legislation pending in Congress that would bar local, state and federal authorities from searching newsrooms without an assertion that the reporter or editor possessing the notes, photographs, tapes, film and the like had committed or was committing the very criminal offense for which the evidence was sought. The proposed legislation would permit a search when it was alleged that the evidence sought would protect human life or (after a proper subpoena) allow a judge to constitute contraband or were the "fruits" or the instruments of a crime. These are ground rules that the news media and law enforcement agencies can live with.
Until the passage of such legislation, Loy and others will spend considerable time in their lawyers' offices that might otherwise be spent gathering and reporting news. We need reporters in our courtrooms as observers, relators and commentators—not as defendants.
Joseph Cooper, an editorial court at the New York Journal of Law and Lecturer in journalism and law at Columbia.
Cuban hijackers deserve island exile
Well, it looks as if those poor Cubans are at it again
An Eastern Airlines flight carrying 251 passengers and crew from New York to Miami Tuesday night was hijacked to Cuba by three Spanish-speaking men brandishing what they said were bottles of gasoline. Although there was no word from Havana on whether the hijackers were Cubans, such a revelation would not be surprising.
Six other airliners have been hijacked in the past two weeks, evidently by Cuban refugees who were not satisfied with their new life in the United States and wanted to return to their social paradise. Several Cubans have been shot dead attempting to board flights with bottles of gasoline.
THEOSE POOR mistreated Cubans, being fed an estimated $100 million in expense to the tune of
The refugees who arrived this summer on the so-called "Freedom Flotilla," courtesy of Fidel Castro, did suffer hardships that rivaled those of them in the United States. Thanks to the U.S. government, many of them made it alive, and, not surprisingly, most were grateful to be here. Even after they arrived, they continued to bear the burden of the U.S. government's incompetency. Herded into tent cities and waiting for days and weeks simply to get home, they were some of the refugees succumbed to the pressure.
DISTURBANCES AND riots broke out at refugee centers in Miami and Fort Chaffee, Ark., among Cubans impatient to become part of the U.S. military. The attack becomes another result of the mass immigration.
If this country is lucky, it has learned a much-needed lesson about its history of kindness to refugees. "Give me your tired, your poor, your sick," he said. "You have become an invocation for a kite in the fire."
I've grown used to the Iranians. After all, they apparently have the same constitutional rights as Americans do to protest, and they have used them. And when they get out of line by destroying property, as they have done on several occasions in California near the deceased shah's sister's house, or by endangering the lives of passers-by, they have the same rights to go to jail or get cracked over the head by the police.
BUT THEY ARE nothing compared to the ungrateful Cubans who have rioted and hijacked airliners. As far as I know, there is no constitutional amendment guaranteeing freedom to Cuban Americans living in this country on the "Freedom Flotilla" are patiently waiting for the ploeding government to
do something about them. Those in that majority are true political prisoners who fled Castro's rule, not Cuba's economic nightmare. It is those who came here expecting to find $$dollar-an-hour jobs waiting for them who are the troublemakers.
Interviews with refugees bear this out. In a New York Times story, one woman, who was
BILL
MENEZES
forced to force the flotilla and leave her seven children in Cuba, called the rioters and hijackers
"It could cost a life," she said. "It is necessary to have patience. I will wait."
A STATE DEPARTMENT spokesman proclaimed that "discontent is proportional to how quickly and thoroughly we can work on housing and jobs and sponsors."
That is ridiculous. We are talking about people who were taken into this country's open arms with no questions asked. That their demands for jobs and housing should be heard and acted upon any faster than any other refugee groups', as many of them evidently believe, is absurd. The miserable and neglected refugees from Haiti and other dictatorships do not have a community of their own people waiting for them in Florida as the Cubans do.
The Florida Cuban community is old and powerful, and many of its members hold public office. On the other hand, Haitians and other less trendy refugee groups are virtually powerless in
the area. The Cuban community has clout, and support of its refugee cousins is a key element for any candidate, local or national, wishing to win in Florida in November.
PERHAPS THE rioting, hijacking refugees believe they can continue their activities virtually unmolested because of that community. Well, at least the rotters can. After the much-anticipated war, theffees, they all were merely herded back into their compound, perhaps to be given another chance.
The hijackers, however, face a tough time. Those who make it back to their homeland have been tossed into prison by the Castro government, which apparently has as little use for them as do. Those arrested here also face stiff sentences and will not return to Cuba for a long time.
The potential for a major loss of life still remains, however. A potential that could arise at any time in the future when a flood of homogeneous refugees is admitted to this country within a small area. Clearly the time for letting in every room and his dog who shows up inside the building is tiring of the past. The administration has shown it simply could not handle such a situation.
ALL POLITICAL reflections aside, however, if the government is not equipped to efficiently deal with situations like this, it must expend its energies to prevent them. Stricter standards for refuge admission are needed, along with more protections for aid and for determining who gets to stay.
As for those poor, mistreated Cubans, if Cuba continues to deny them re-entry to their country, we will plate them will have to be found. Maybe we can convince the government to reopen Alcatraz.
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