Preach to us what you teach By Lama Tassabehji--- Journalism is not a skill you are born with; it comes with experience. However, there are courses available to students that can arm them with the basic tools of news writing. I have personally taken two journalism courses at AUB since I entered two years ago and joined Outlook. Mass Media and Society (SBHS 244) is a course open to students to enhance their knowledge about the history and present day developments in the media and society. This course deals with the various existing laws concerning the media, how they are being implemented, and how they are changing with society. Students are taught that as long as the reporter is relaying a truthful message to the reader, who has a right to know the truth, then he or she is doing nothing wrong. Basic News Reporting (SBHS 205) is another course the university offers that I have taken to learn more about the field of journalism. The purpose of this course is to teach prospective journalists how to write articles, interview people, and how to put a story together. Again, ethics of journalism and laws reporters should follow are also part of class discussions. With these two courses, a journalist-to-be has the basic skills required. Logically, the next step for this student would be to try and experiment with all the knowledge he or she has gained. Outlook, the official student publication of AUB, would be one means of dabbling in journalism at a student level. However, I feel that either all the things I was taught were wrong, or what is happening to Outlook is wrong; they don't correlate. On the one hand, we are told that journalists have the freedom to write any article, as long as it is the truth, and abides by all the journalistic ethics and laws I mentioned before. On the other hand, other individuals are saying journalists should take people's pride and feelings into consideration before writing their "truthful and honest article." In journalism, every reader has the right to reply, as does every journalist have the right to write his or her article the way he or she wants to write it without interference. If the editor does not like the article, he or she shouldn't publish it. It shouldn't have to go any further than that. I have some personal experience in this matter. When I wrote an article about faculty attrition, I interviewed two people, one in person and one by e-mail. These two people commented on the same point: the truth as they knew it. My job as a reporter was to report to the reader what these professors thought of this issue. After having written the article, which was approved by the editor, I was told that I knew nothing about journalism and that the way I conducted my interviews and research was wrong. The article was not to be published without what was termed by the administration as "the other side of the story." People say that Outlook reporters get to voice their opinion and write their articles freely, and not as they believe we should write them and express them. I'm not so sure that's true.