On Tuesday night about 500 people packed into the University Auditorium for the Student Government and Freshman Leadership Council candidate debate.
But if you weren’t physically present at the event, don’t expect to hear or see anything from it apart from our coverage and tweets aggregated by a hashtag.
FLC will not be releasing footage of the debate, nor any other kind of recording or transcript. In fact, the organization did not permit video recording of the debate, which, regardless of any legal implications this may have, is a complete disservice to the students relying on this semester’s only two-sided debate to make an informed decision come election time.
In a comment thread on the event’s Facebook page, a commenter said FLC allowed SGTV to record but only during the first five minutes of the debate.
On the same page, three separate people asked three separate times if video footage of the debate would ever be released.
It’s a fair question: The debate was attended by only 500 people. This amounts to roughly 1 percent of the Student Body. And that number isn’t a result of apathy but of physics and time. Remember, the debate was held in the University Auditorium, not Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, and students have packed schedules that may not have allowed them to attend. But none of those questions received an immediate response from FLC.
Then, Ryan Baum, a 21-year-old public relations junior and a volunteer with Access Party, posted on the page asking why the questions had been repeatedly ignored. A Facebook user named JJ Junior went off on a fervent rant about how these FLC staffers are so busy and how agonizingly long it takes to get a quality video produced. Oh, and he had the courtesy to include an ad-hominem attack against the original poster. Straight-up immature insults aside, this comment implied a video of the event exists — somewhere.
Evidently, though, Junior was mistaken. FLC posted an update a little while later that said there is no video, that there never was a video and if you’d like to know what happened, you can turn to the Alligator’s Twitter coverage. The logic behind this decision stems from a desire to “protect the integrity” of the debate, as well as concerns that footage would be “used out of context.”
We find this excuse utterly baffling.
The one and only way to guarantee footage from the debate is not taken out of context is to provide something against which soundbites and extraneous documentation can be compared, i.e. video and audio recordings of the entire debate.
Faulty logic isn’t the only problem here. Keeping the debate under wraps denies the content of the debate to the 99 percent of the Student Body who didn’t attend.
The Alligator is looking into these concerns for a news story. As of Wednesday night, FLC Director of Student Government Outreach Melody Zargari declined to comment. For a transcript of the Q&A and closing statements, visit alligator.org.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 2/19/2015]
