Complaint against university magazine SAM was unjustified, Press Council rules

The Press Council has rejected a complaint against university magazine SAM. It was lodged by a committee at the HAN University of Applied Sciences.

Earlier this year, HAN university magazine SAM published an article about grants for student association board members. In it, two student board members voiced their dissatisfaction with the assessment committee for board grants.

They said the amounts paid to board members could vary considerably. One receives a few tens of euros a month, while another gets hundreds of euros. They consider this unfair. So they launched a campaign calling for all board members to receive fair compensation.

The article did not go down well with the assessment committee for board grants, which filed a complaint. The committee said SAM had presented an ‘unbalanced picture’, in which the students’ experiences had ‘wrongly been presented as facts’. It also claimed that SAM had not given it sufficient opportunity to respond.

Free to decide

The Press Council takes a different view. Journalists are generally free to decide what to write about and which perspective to highlight, the Council stressed. The fact that the assessment committee disagrees with the views of the students interviewed does not mean SAM cannot write about them.

The Council said it was also sufficiently clear to readers that the article mainly represented the students’ views. SAM had made a sufficient distinction ‘between facts, claims and opinions’.

The university magazine had also asked the assessment committee for a response several times. The committee did not take up the offer. “There is no evidence of any journalistically impermissible bias”, the Council concluded. The complaint was therefore rejected.