No laws were broken, no formal policies violated, but Student Run Television was shut down for almost four days last week because it allegedly broadcast pornographic material.

SRTV is broadcast on closed-circuit cable, so its editorial content is not obliged to comply with the Federal Communications Commission standards that apply to regular broadcast stations. And as a public university, UCSD cannot exercise authority over the editorial content of student-run media like SRTV, according to the Student Press Law Center.

But, UCSD Healthcare (which houses facilities used by Triton Cable) interrupted the SRTV broadcast on May 15, and the university kept the station from broadcasting for days when there was no established campus protocol that dictated such action was acceptable.

UCSD Healthcare should have consulted with SRTV to solve the problem instead of making the rash and unfounded decision to take matters into its own hands. The channels of communication between the university and SRTV should have been more open at each step of the process.

Now UCSD Healthcare and Preuss are filtering objectionable content on SRTV from their systems with new equipment. That’s what they should have done in the first place.