This column has not been easy to write.

Through many rewrites, revisions and a couple of times of starting over, I’ve tried to answer the question of why people should care about the Kernel’s conflict with UK Athletics.

And personally, I wanted to answer a smaller part of that question as to why I care. Yes, I’m the editor-in-chief, but why do I feel this is an issue worth fighting for?

I’ve given many interviews this past week, and when I’ve been asked the question about why people should care, I’ve given the straight-laced journalistic answer — “We are journalists and pursue the truth, and for UK Athletics to ‘punish’ us because our reporter was doing his job, is not right.”

I don’t want this column to be the “high and mighty” or “preachy” journalistic answer. I want to answer the question as a real person.

This week has been hectic for us at the Kernel. Our phones have not stopped ringing, and our email inboxes and Twitter feeds have filled up with support from people all over the country.

We, as reporters, are not normally the center of attention, and we like it that way.

Journalists should report the news, not be the people in the news.

I know it’s been tough on the Kernel reporter and editor whose phone calls sparked this whole controversy. He’s been caught in the middle of wanting to do his job and feeling like he should have just called UK Media Relations.

And that’s true. If he had just called Media Relations to confirm that the two students were walk-ons, he would have been able to attend the “privileged” one-on-one interviews with the men’s basketball team, and this story wouldn’t have made the headlines.

But he did call the students directly and his “punishment” did make the headlines.

I can’t speak for the other journalists who came to our defense, but I think our struggle with UK Athletics speaks to the bigger issue of a governmental power trying to control the distribution of information.

UK looked like a controlling parent trying to punish a disobedient child who didn’t follow certain guidelines, but the Kernel is independent of the university.  As journalists, we are not bound by those guidelines, although we generally do follow them.

I know many people don’t — and probably never will — understand why our reporter didn’t call Media Relations first. Couldn’t UK Athletics have told our reporter if the students had joined the team?

Possibly. But what if UK didn’t want the news released yet? Then, our reporter may have not been able to confirm the story, and who would have been better to confirm the story than the sources themselves?

When the powers that be can control what information is released, people will only hear the sanitized version of the news. This “clean” version often doesn’t tell the whole story and leaves many questions unanswered.

And that’s why people should care about what I’m sure seems to many like the story of a thwarted college journalist.

Our reporter was trying to get to the true story and was punished for it. Though we are college journalists, we don’t want to settle for being told the news; we want to find the news and report it.

Not all of the feedback we’ve heard this week has been positive. Kernel staffers have been called “pretend journalists” and “disingenuous.”

Though I’m a tough-skinned person, it’s discouraging to know people don’t think we are capable of real journalistic work.

I know the Kernel staff has handled itself in a mature way this week — a way that shows we are unafraid to take on an entity that tries to pressure us into being an ineffective news organization.

This column may not sway everyone to understand why we took up this battle with UK Athletics, but at least we’ve tried to show our side of the story, the one that hasn’t been fully told.