I am utterly disappointed and frustrated with the Oct. 10, 2006 cover story entitled “Disband of Brothers.”
This article lacks the “balanced” credentials that are not only ensured to be applied by “The Temple News” but also expected of a college newspaper. The article possesses elements of bias and deliberate accounts of character defamation.
While the collective character of the TKE fraternity is currently under questioning, the author selectively included negative visuals and opinions that lack validity and correlation to the supposed focus of the article, which intensifies the pre-existing pessimistic judgments.
The section of the article which discloses the thoughts and beliefs of Ms. Lamona Strong, the 19-year-old mother, hardly encompasses and defines the consensus of an entire neighborhood, making the inference that neighbors, plural, found the fraternity to be disruptive a forged generalization.
I question the complaints and sensibility of a person who chooses to live on the borders of an inner city college campus,
and more specifically behind a row of fraternity houses, and naively expects to have quiet, tranquil nights.
I have attended many of the TKE hosted events in my two years at Temple University and was also in attendance at the spring break activities Miss Strong comments on. Neither then, nor any other time, have I ever witnessed my peers “all getting naked,” as she falsely claims. Her comparison of spring TKE parties to a spring break is an exaggerated and fabricated account of what really happened behind the houses of 16th Street and falsely portrays the behavior of the TKE brothers and their fellow peers.
The vividly described trash in the back of the former TKE house is a digression from the serving of the search and seizure warrant and contributes to the author’s biased depiction of the fraternity. How do a moldy pepperoni pizza slice and broken glass fragments correlate to the fraternity’s transgressions? The answer is they do not.
And similar to the irrelevance of this paragraph is the picture of the trash on the front cover of the paper. The deliberate placement of this photograph next to the image of the distraught fraternity members overtly expresses a negative association of TKE with carelessness and negligence which Temple News readers will subconsciously apply to their opinions of the allegations.
More important than the lack of validity of these claims is the lack of correspondence they hold to the suspension and allegations the fraternity faces. A picture of waste and the opinions of one neighbor have no relationship to the incidences and events of Sept. 23 and Sept. 25.
I am curious if the author was fishing for a story or failed to investigate the stories surrounding the facts. A reputation is a subjective quality of an organization that constantly changes; this article creates an unnecessary and unconstructive interpretation of TKE’s reputation.
-Emily M. Albert
Junior
Psychology
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