Dear editors of the Daily Free Press,

At 10:00pm on Wednesday night, a dozen people (some of us BU students) demonstrated in front of BU President Robert Brown’s house in Brookline, protesting the proposed BU biolab in Roxbury which could break ground this month. Shortly after 1:00am on Thursday morning, we sent you a press release full of information about our action, including the address of our website with pictures and media contacts in case you wanted to interview us. We sent this same press release to over 30 other media outlets. The Boston Globe published a story on us, but you, a Boston University newspaper, didn’t.

Obviously your editorial team has to make decisions about what you choose to publish. I’m a member of the Student Underground collective, and we too get submissions that we choose to ignore. On February 10th you ran an article about the increasing price of taxicabs in Cambridge, but you didn’t run an article about BU students protesting the president of your university for trying to build a bioterrorism lab in the poorest and blackest part of the greater Boston area. Why?

How can you justify ignoring the community struggles that BU students are involved in when they ask for media coverage? How can you justify ignoring the administration of BU when they take Homeland Security money to build a bioweapons lab in Roxbury, without any community accountability? Why is it that you call yourself “The Independent Student Newspaper at Boston University” and why do you have the audacity to call yourself “Free”?

This has been going on for years. According to a Boston Phoenix article written in December of 1999, Roni Krouzman, the founder of the Student Underground, helped stage a protest about BU dorm policy in 1995 at the inauguration ceremony of Jon Westling, the then new president of BU. When the Daily Free Press refused to cover the protest, he made his own coverage and called it the Student Underground.

There’s a reason why people go out of their way to read the Underground, and to read the Sam Adams Review, and now the BU Source. It’s because the Daily Free Press, “The Independent Student Newspaper at Boston University,” isn’t independent at all. It’s a sad day when the Boston Globe gives BU activists more coverage than the BU student newspaper. The Freep is nothing but a dull mouthpiece for the BU administration. Please, grow a spine and start covering the social justice struggles that BU students are involved in and the social justice atrocities that the BU administration is committing.

Micah Lee Operation: Over http://operationover.freeyouth.net