Ethics Questions

As you can likely tell from our lead story today, we found out over the weekend that some juniors who are members of the Student Government Association are preparing to run to be next year's SGA president. It was great news for us because we've been working to bring our coverage of SGA, ESC, and GSSC up to the level of CCSC so we can confront allegations of bias, not with claims that "we'll try harder," but proof that we're actually doing something. A story announcing the candidates are set to run, as we do with CCSC was just the kind of thing that we needed.
So we did what we do when we report. We called the candidates, got them to confirm on the record, called members of the elections board, checked to see if we could find out who else was running, and left it at that.
That was, until we found out that an SGA elections code by-law prohibited candidates from announcing their candidacy before the filing deadline as it would constitute an instance of unfair campaigning. The reasoning is simple: So SGA elections don't become as drawn out as presidential elections, the SGA will disqualify anybody who announces before they're ready for it. Suddenly, we were being told that publishing the article, even though the two candidates didn't know about the rule, could lead to them being disqualified from the election.
So, here are some of the questions that we asked ourselves before publishing the article:

Does the newsworthiness of announcing candidacies outweigh the possibility of said candidates being disqualified?

Are there circumstances under which we shouldn't publish information that we were freely given?

Do we have an obligation to protect candidates from disqualification if they freely gave us the information that would disqualify them?

Do we owe candidates a chance to respond or revise their comments if we find out about the rule?

Are any of these answers contingent upon candidates telling us that they either do or don't know the rules?

As a reporter, is there a difference between a candidate telling us she doesn't know about the rule and her actually not knowing about the rule?

If a candidate knows the rule and still tells us about her candidacy, do we have an obligation to report their flouting the rules?

Do the rules change if we are told independently of the candidate that she is running?

Should we ever attempt to influence elections coordinators to bend the rules?

If it's not the place of the paper to publish information that could lead to people getting disqualified, what assurances would be necessary for the paper to receive to publish the information with a clear conscience?

While I won't get into my answers these questions, I can assure you we considered them all and several more before deciding to publish the article today. We do not take these decisions lightly, and it took about two hours and several phone calls to come to the consensus that we should, indeed, publish the article. And for what it's worth, I believe that given all of the information we had last night, everybody reading this blog would have agreed with our final decision.