Cal State L.A. Paper Fights for Survival : Storm Raging Over Financing, Freedom

At Cal State Los Angeles, one of the year’s more animated civics lessons is being taught without benefit of classroom or professor.

Instead, an often acrimonious allegory, in which the main characters are the First Amendment, Representative Government and old-fashioned Economics, is being staged in the halls of the student assembly and on the pages of the student newspaper.

The editors of the University Times, an 8,000 circulation, financially troubled daily that is supported largely by student fees and university funds, have accused student government leaders of trying to close the paper in order to silence its criticism of their administration.

‘Strangling Us’

“They’re, like, strangling us; they’re putting tape over our mouths, that’s what they’re doing,” said University Times staff member Shiela Salazar, 22. “We feel hopeless at this point, we really do.”

“We’re on our last legs, as far as our funding goes,” said the paper’s editor in chief, Keith Jordan, a 28-year-old senior.

Heightening their concern, the editors say, are unexplained incidents in which an intruder tampered with news stories stored on computer disks and a vandal destroyed the paper’s $3,200 UPI news service satellite dish.

Student leaders contend that the newspaper editors have used the University Times to promote their own views, given inadequate coverage to campus organizations, and failed to properly account for student money the newspaper spends.

Alternate Paper

The 27-year-old student government president, Eric Peacock, and his colleagues have financed an alternate campus paper, the Eagle’s Eye, in part with money originally earmarked for advertising in the University Times. The Eagle’s Eye published two issues during the fall quarter. But Peacock said he has no interest in shutting down the University Times.

“There are a lot of allegations being made,” Peacock said. “There are a lot of misunderstandings going on . . . .

“What’s important here is that the university is not going to let the University Times die,” Peacock said. “This has been explained to the University Times people, but they have not printed that in their paper.”

A projected shortfall this year of $118,000 prompted the paper’s paid publisher, former Chicago Tribune reporter Joan Zyda, 35, to write a memo last month suggesting that the paper might have to close, cut back its publishing schedule or eliminate some or all of its paid staff. Before two recent budget-related layoffs and one unrelated resignation, salaries for the five paid staff members, including the publisher, amounted to about $90,000 a year.

“Unless substantial additional funding is made available, I would recommend closing the paper,” Zyda wrote. Zyda became the publisher in September, she said, without knowing the depth of the paper’s financial difficulties.

Changes Contemplated

A spokeswoman for Cal State Los Angeles said the University Times will continue to publish. However, she explained, campus officials are contemplating significant changes in the methods the paper uses to account for and spend its money. The spokeswoman, Ruth Y. Goldway, public affairs director at the campus, left open the possibility that the paper may publish fewer than its usual four issues a week beginning next year. A final decision on the restructuring is expected in January.

“We’re committed to ensuring that there is a university paper,” said Goldway, a former mayor of Santa Monica. “We think it’s an important and integral part of the educational curriculum . . . .”

The University Times, Goldway said, is an educational laboratory that functions as part of the school’s journalism program. Many, but not all, of the students who write for the paper receive course credit.

All 19 campuses in the California State University system have some type of student newspaper, a spokesman for the system said, published as often as every day or as infrequently as once a week. Some are supported exclusively through student fees, while others are paid for out of academic budgets. None is financially independent.

Start of Trouble

The animosity between the University Times editors and the leaders of the Associated Students, as the Cal State Los Angeles student government is called, began last spring, the editors said, when the paper successfully opposed a referendum to raise student fees. Since then, the brouhaha has been extensively covered by the University Times.

A headline on one editorial read, “Peacock Tramples First Amendment Press Rights.” Another said, “Board Fiddles While (University Times) Burns.” A headline over a news story announced, “(Associated Students) Member Throws Tantrum.”

In one news story, the paper accused Peacock of plagiarizing portions of his campaign literature. Peacock, in turn, has begun demanding that University Times reporters submit their questions to him in advance, in writing.

The paper also has taken shots at the school’s administration. One editorial entitled “Silly PR Mania Sweeping Campus” accused Goldway of improperly interfering with the paper’s attempts to gather news, an accusation Goldway denied in a subsequent letter to the editor.

In another instance, an editorial cartoon portrayed university President James Rosser as a Roman emperor turning thumbs down as a gladiator representing the student government held a sword over a fallen combatant labeled “U.T.”

Of the 12 front-page stories carried in the paper during the week of Dec. 7, seven reported on various aspects of the paper’s financial problems or its dispute with the student leaders, as did three of four editorial cartoons.

“It appears that sometimes the only information they print is information that personally affects them . . . ,” Peacock said.

At the center of the debate are two ancient issues: money and power.

In the last fiscal year, University Times staffers said the paper spent about $250,000 to publish 140 issues--four a week during the fall, winter and spring quarters, and 20 during the summer. Income from advertising sold by students covered about $112,000 of the expenses, the staff said, and the paper received an additional $55,000 from a fund that is financed by student fees. The university picked up the rest of the costs with money from its general accounts. Advertising revenue is expected to decline to $80,000 this year.

In years past, before the position of publisher was created, university-paid faculty members served as newspaper advisers, while other university personnel were involved in bookkeeping and financial management, Goldway said.

“My understanding is that every year, the university has, through its . . . general academic accounts . . . subsidized the University Times,” she added.

In return for financial support from the university, the University Times is required to comply with a Communications Code that establishes standards of fairness and accountability for campus media.

A seven-member Communications Board monitors the media for compliance. On the board sit three students chosen by the Associated Students, three faculty members and Goldway, who represents the university president. Until recently, Peacock was one of the student representatives.

In addition to keeping an eye on the Communications Code, the board makes preliminary recommendations on the amount of money the paper will receive from student fees, and has the authority to reject the paper’s choice for its editor-in-chief, a prerogative that the board has exercised in the recent past.

Conflict Seen

All of this, in Publisher Zyda’s view, amounts to a serious conflict of interest.

There is an inherent problem, she said, with having the subjects of news stories, such as Goldway and Peacock, sitting on a board that monitors the paper’s performance and makes recommendations about its budget.

“You know what appalls me,” Zyda said, “is just really how few people here know what the First Amendment is, I mean from the top guy all the way down. How can we expect Eric Peacock to know what it means if the university president isn’t quite sure what it is?”

Zyda said she was referring to a conversation during which she asked Rosser if the university could buy more advertising to support the newspaper. Rosser, she said, suggested he might consider the request if the paper would agree to write news stories to accompany the advertisements.

“His attitude was, ‘If I’m going to spend this money, I would want certain favors.’ And I explained that that was unacceptable . . . ,” Zyda said.

No Response

Goldway said she was not present during the conversation and therefore could not respond.

Although Peacock said he stepped down from the Communications Board to diffuse the controversy, the student government president said he sees no conflict of interest. Representatives of the student government have a legitimate right to question the way that student fees are spent, Peacock said, and a legitimate interest in the newspaper’s compliance with the tenets of good journalism.

In a recent debate with Laura G. Brown, one of the University Times editors, Peacock noted that the Communications Code requires that anyone subjected to “a personal attack” in the newspaper “shall be given the opportunity by the editor to reply in the same issue.”

“You should give me the same amount of space that you are using to attack me,” Peacock told Brown.

Brown suggested that what Peacock really wants is the authority to review University Times articles before they are published.

Core of Problem

Student newspapers at some major U.S. colleges and universities are financially independent and operate as business enterprises separate from the administration and student government. In an interview, Peacock said much of the dispute would evaporate if the University Times were not so closely tied to the school, both academically and financially. “If the campus newspaper were completely independent and were not part of the university teaching curriculum, and if it were not collecting student fees, then it would not fall under the Communications Board (and) there would be no problem,” he said.

Goldway agreed. “To the extent that this is an education experience and part of the curriculum and (is) subsidized by student fees and by the university, there is a certain inevitability that (the newspaper’s) funds are going to be reviewed by somebody or another who might potentially have a different point of view from the paper,” she said.

Despite the acrimony, Goldway said she believes the controversy has had some value.

‘Exciting and Useful’

“I think the debate about whether there is a conflict of interest or not, whether it’s appropriate for an elected official to serve on so many boards, what is personal attack versus public policy debate in a newspaper, is all really exciting and useful,” she said.

“In that sense, I think it’s really good for the campus to have this kind of energetic debate. . . . I hope that it results in a stronger Associated Students, with more students participating, and a stronger University Times.”

But Peacock is not so sure. “It’s healthy if all sides are discussed,” he said. “But when one side has essentially an unlimited ink supply . . . I don’t think that’s a civics lesson.”