Not all press is good press.
 

On Feb. 25, Texas A&M University-Commerce’s student paper, The East Texan, ran a front-page story about the arrest of two of the school’s football players in a drug bust. Early that morning, other members of the team went around campus and stole every issue of the paper from campus newsstands.
 

When confronted with the evidence of the team’s misconduct, including a video of several players in the act, football coach Guy Morriss stood with the team, saying, “I’m proud of my players for doing that.” Needless to say, that wasn’t the response the school was looking for.
 

For one thing, the players’ actions were illegal. The East Texan, like The Daily Campus, offers one free copy of every issue to its readers but charges an additional 25 cents for extra copies (The Daily Campus charges 50 cents). Given that the team stole every copy on campus, they weren’t just taking small change.
 

More importantly, what they did was just plain wrong. It’s a newspaper’s job to report the news, and sometimes that’s going to include scrutiny some would rather avoid. But if people were allowed to block stories they didn’t like, Richard Nixon would have gone down in history as a popular two-term president, no one would have ever heard of Abu Ghraib and veterans at Walter Reed would never have gotten the treatment they deserve. The free exercise of the press may be the most valuable of American rights.
 

The university should punish the perpetrators of the newspaper theft and make it clear that it stands by the right of its students to get information about their school. Coach Morriss should help lead the investigation and stand by whatever decision the university makes. If he continues to refuse to hold his team accountable, he will have shown himself unfit to discharge his professional responsibilities, which include not just the athletic but the ethical guidance of his team.
 

The university should not tolerate such a poor role model.

Nathaniel French is a junior theater major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].