SU censors clamp down on beleaguered Ripple

Leicester Uni’s student paper, The Ripple, struggled to get past the Orwellian conduct of the Student Union’s executive team, and so have missed their printing deadline.

Unlike the Tab, The Ripple’s publications have to be approved by the Student Union executive team due to the new media constitution, and so was sent on Thursday 9th October to SU president Michael Rubin and the ARC for proofing.

A negative front page story on the the lack of engagement within the Union however, saw the paper receive verbal threats of closure if the article wasn’t removed.

ARC and executive team have to approve all Ripple publications

The Ripple’s editor-in-chief, Jess Buckley, explained their predicament in an online piece published today.

She said they missed their 12pm Friday deadline to print the issue, due to the executive team taking twenty-seven hours to finally concede they couldn’t legally get rid of the article.

President of The Ripple, Lauren Swain, said this morning, “it’s disappointing that even in this day and age censorship is still present, and is still committed by some of the people we trusted to be in charge.”

Sean Kelly-Walsh, Engagement Officer, was quoted in the negative story in question

The SU team only have the right to stop publication if the content is ‘illegal, libel or of an unconstitutional nature’.

The fortnightly piece was meant to be available to read today but has had to be pushed back to tomorrow due to the twenty-seven hours the executive team took to ‘proof-read’ it.

This years core executive team are Michael Rubin (President), Sean Kelly-Walsh (Engagement Officer, who was directly quoted in the piece), Yordan Nikolov (Education Officer) and Jay Appleyard (Experience Officer).

Students took to twitter to criticise the SU

The Ripple were also accused by the SU ‘dream team’ of contravening the SU constitution and of inaccurate reporting but could not specify any particular parts or facts respectively, when asked.

Swain told the Tab, “it’s the second time the Union have tried to censor us in the short space of two weeks and there is currently a referendum to stop this from happening again.”

The Ripple were asked, and agreed, to pull a piece regarding careers from their online site after it was printed in their first issue.

Twitter reactions; a petition has also been launched

Swain added that if the referendum isn’t passed, the SU’s attempted stifling, “will continue to be an issue for a long time to come”.

Achieving more publicity, and probably more readership, through this turn of events than The Ripple can usually only imagine, the SU executive team have drawn more attention to the issue than it initially would have had.

Backlash is gathering momentum on twitter, a facebook page has been created and a petition against press censorship launched.

Last year, the SU closed to force people to vote in its elections

Last year, when the SU made the mistake of closing its doors to try and force people to vote in the SU elections, student backlash caused a U-turn.

The Ripple are currently in talks with the executive team to try and reach a better agreement.

But this looks like this years executive teams’ biggest mistake so far, and term only started two weeks ago.