Free-to-public newspaper theft is still a crime
>>Print ViewPublication Date: 03/09/2010
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Stealing newspapers that contain a negative story about someone to prevent shame or embarrassment may seem like a good idea, but members of the Texas A&M University-Commerce football team are learning otherwise.
A Feb. 25 edition of A&M’s campus newspaper, The East Texan, contained a story about two football players involved in a drug bust. The football team then stole every copy of the newspaper on campus before anyone could read it and were caught on video. Instead of prohibiting anyone from seeing the story, they drew even more attention to it with their stunt.
We learned through “Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix” that the fastest way to ensure something is read (like Harry’s interview about Voldemort’s return) is to ban it. The East Texan story earned national attention when it was posted on the college section of the highly-read Huffington Post Web site. If the players had not stolen the newspaper, far less people would have noticed the story.
People are outraged at the way football coach Guy Morriss reacted to the thefts. He said he was proud of the team’s actions and called it “the best team-building exercise we have ever done.”
The university has said it will be taking “appropriate action” against the team’s transgressions. Morriss failed to see how taking a free newspaper could be considered stealing. Something being free to the customer does not make it entirely free of cost. It is expensive to print just one issue of The Exponent, which is free to our readership. Paper, ink and labor costs all add up; according to our publisher, Pat Kuhnle, each edition of The Exponent costs $8,630.76 to produce, to be exact.
If someone stole all of the copies of The Exponent at Purdue, Purdue Police said it would be reported as a theft. Police base theft on whether there is a monetary loss to the victim, and in this hypothetical situation, the victim would be The Exponent.
Aside from just being unethical for monetary reasons, attempting to prevent people from reading a news source is censorship. The football players were trying to control what The East Texan could and could not print by trying to prevent anyone from reading a true, though unflattering, news article.
A word of advice: If you ever end up on the front page of The Exponent for one scandal or another, stealing all of the copies would do nothing but ensure everyone on campus would see the story.