Content warning: This article contains references to sexual violence.
When institutions fail their students, student journalism is there to call for justice and institutional accountability. Yet, sensationalized articles and short-lived media cycle rotations fail to answer the burning question: beyond the headlines, what exactly are we demanding?
Student journalists exist at a unique intersection. As students, they depend on universities for their education, and often much more, such as a place to live, help paying tuition and access to healthcare. As journalists, however, they have a responsibility to hold those very institutions accountable.
Reconciling these two roles requires editorial independence, which means no university official, professor or staff member can have a say in what gets published. At its best, this editorial independence allows student journalism to serve the public by illuminating what powerful institutions would rather leave in the dark. This was exemplified last month in The Cornell Daily Sun’s reporting of an alleged 2024 gang rape in the Chi Phi fraternity house.
The article revealed the layers of campus culture and institutional complicity that have allowed rape culture to persist on college campuses nationwide. The article’s author meticulously outlines Jane Doe’s account of the alleged incident, bringing each reported detail into public view with a rawness that strips away the distance between the reader and the realities being described.
This reporting deepens as the writer identifies the named defendants, placing the individuals involved and the circumstances of the case under public scrutiny. This journalistic choice has itself drawn controversy, but in doing so, it confronts a central tension of student journalism: how to sensitively report serious concerns and crises while ensuring that matters of public concern do not disappear from view.
In its subsequent editorial, “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” The Cornell Daily Sun takes up that responsibility more directly, articulating why student journalism must do more than document events. Student journalism must pursue the questions institutions would rather leave unanswered, especially when an institution’s commitment to preserving its reputation threatens to overshadow student safety. The deficiency of institutional policies for one student represents a deficiency of protections for all students, necessitating an external audience to demand change. As a Stanford Jane Doe states, “without a headline, survivors like me will never matter to Stanford.”
However, when presented with such sensitive cases, publications like The Cornell Daily Sun and The Stanford Daily have a journalistic obligation to both accuracy and being held accountable for their impact. Student journalists must ensure that victims’ cases are not reduced to another media headline devoid of institutional demands. Sensationalizing victims’ stories, even if unintentional, weakens the diagnostic criticism of college cultures and institutions—crucially, these stories apply public pressure to the perpetrators but not to institutional deficiencies.
With each newly reported Jane/John Doe, the entanglement between student journalism and justice grows. Provocative titles like “Cornell Won’t, We Will” assert the role of student journalists as enforcers of accountability but also as antagonists to administration. The problem arises when these stories extend outside of campuses and become media fodder for the American public.
When The New York Times and California Post report about sexual assault, the discussion is no longer about accountability for perpetrators or reforms to Title IX systems. Rather, it becomes a moralistic debate about sexual assault—de-centering institutional shortcomings and the culture that brews these circumstances. The relationship between public attention and campus reform is contentious at best—when thousands of Instagram commenters take stake in the discourse, sexual assault becomes a platform for discourse rather than an actionable problem to be confronted by universities.
Student journalism must consider and analyze the end products beyond discourse, and identify what they want their end goal to be. And more specifically, what that looks like in comparison to the aftermath of the fires they set.
Headlines often reduce perpetrators to a “few bad apples” as opposed to addressing the roots of the rotten tree. As student journalists, we have the responsibility to not only publicize such acts, but also demand that our universities address the institutional policies that allow for such injustice to run free.