For those of you who don’t know, SUU school of business has recently achieved AACSB accreditation. According to Dr. Tufte, out of 3,000 universities only 300 have this level of accreditation. That means that SUU’s school of business is considered in the top 10% of all business schools in the US! This also means that our credits will transfer to virtually any school and it reflects a high level of education.
This seems like this would be news worthy. However, not a peep of this news was in Southern Utah’s local newspaper The Spectrum. Even our own school newspaper The Journal didn't mention anything other than a small article with a picture of Dean Templin eating cake somewhere buried in the back. Dean Templin flew all the way to Paris to get that award and cake in addition to all of the hard work of the business school's faculty. It’s not even a story worthy of The Journal’s website!
I have noticed a significant bias in our newspapers against SUU, the business school in particular. For example, just the other day The Spectrum ran an article about one of Dixie State’s students getting an internship with Senator Hatch. Somewhere buried within that article was the news that SUU was in the Princeton Review’s top schools. To me news of a small school like SUU getting this kind of prestige is very news worthy. It’s great that Dixie State has a student interning with Sen. Hatch. But do they have to bury other good news of SUU in the middle? By the way, SUU has sent two students as interns under Sen. Bennett. That wasn’t in the newspaper either.
So what does this have to do with economics? Everything. If you are a business owner in an area like Southern Utah and you get on the bad side of the local newspaper because you kissed the editor’s girlfriend in high school, you’re screwed. Capitalism doesn’t get to work for you. Even though you may provide better service, prices, etc. than your competitors you will have an uphill battle because of little or bad press.
Now is there a bias? Absolutely. If The Spectrum is this biased against a school in it’s own small community, think of how biased the "big" media could be against anything! It’s unfortunate the media only gives us the information it wants us to have.
Boo on The Spectrum.
1 comment:
-1 on Hannah's post for a spelling error.
We talked over this in class, and I spoke my piece there.
N.B. I did not give that 300 out of 3,000 figure (it was brought up by a student).
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