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Editorial: Restrictions suppress student journalism

By Tim Herrera

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Los Angeles City College’s student-run newspaper, the Collegian, is an award-winning publication that has been in continuous print for 80 years. Its staff of approximately 30 students works tirelessly to publish high-quality content while adhering to rigorous journalistic values. The Collegian is a training ground for writers, reporters, columnists and editors, as are thousands of other student-run publications that hold to the same principles, standards and ethics.

But LACC’s president, Jamillah Moore, has made calculated attempts to hinder the students’ right to a free press.

She has tried to forbid a company working with the college from speaking to the student press; she has tried to pressure student reporters to sign releases for recording public meetings; she has violated California Open Meeting Laws by requesting that reporters identify themselves; and she has attempted to silence the Collegian by slashing its budget by 40 percent — when the budgets of other student organizations were cut only 15 percent.

Adam Goldstein of the Student Press Law Center has called her “the single most repeat First Amendment violator in the nation.”

And now, Moore is attempting to move the Collegian under student services, where the administration would have the option to edit all content, monitor stories and determine the direction of the paper.

An attack on free speech anywhere is an attack on free speech everywhere. That is why we, the undersigned, have come together to universally condemn the actions of Jamillah Moore and the actions of any administration that makes deliberate efforts to break the free speech of student publications.

As students, we have been taught to expect an environment where freedom of speech will go uncontested. And as student journalists, we expect our administrations to understand that we strive to be an objective voice of reason.

But we also recognize that any publication that disturbs the comfort of the comfortable will be challenged.

Student journalists at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of New Mexico and the University of Oregon, as well as countless untold others, have seen such assaults on their rights. This cannot stand.

We, as student journalists, come together today with a single message:

We will not tolerate administrations that, for their own benefit, try to silence the voice of the student free press. We will continue to rebuke those in power who hope to trounce our right to free speech, and we will not be silenced.

This editorial was published in and endorsed by the following student-run newspapers:

The Collegian, Los Angeles City College; The Cornell Daily Sun, Cornell University; The Daily Orange, Syracuse University; The Daily Princetonian, Princeton University; The Daily Sundial, California State University Northridge; East Los Angeles Campus News, East Los Angeles College; FS View & Florida Flambeau, Florida State University; The GW Hatchet, George Washington University; The Ithacan, Ithaca College; The Maneater, University of Missouri; The New Hampshire, University of New Hampshire; Oregon Daily Emerald, University of Oregon; The Rocky Mountain Collegian, Colorado State University; The Roundup, Pierce College; The Stanford Daily, Stanford University; The University Daily Kansan, University of Kansas; Washington Square News, New York University.

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Comments

Editorial: Restrictions suppress student journalism

Who says a budget cut is an attempt to silence? That's reading way too far into it.

Editorial: Restrictions suppress student journalism

handy--
It's actually a pretty typical form of administrative censorship — so much so that there have been several court cases that have found disproportionate budget cuts on student media amount to administrators attempting to exert unlawful control over student publications.

Jonathan Kealing
Online editor — LJWorld.com
Former editor of The University Daily Kansan (2006).

Editorial: Restrictions suppress student journalism

Maybe she didn't feel like it was an essential service to students? I can understand how it CAN be an attempt to exert control, but how do we know that was her intention? I'm just trying to look at it from both angles. The nice thing about cutting a newspaper's funding as opposed to other services - newspapers can make money by selling more ads or save money by cutting the size.

What were the other services that were cut by 15%? If we cut funding to the bus system by 40%, it would NOT be able to operate, for example. Imagine how much of a hit Watkins would take if we cut it by 40%. A newspaper, on the otherhand, is fairly elastic - and the trend towards reading it online (we are doing that right now) makes reporting have a leaner overhead, verses printing thousands of copies which may go unread by the end of the day, and more often than not thrown away. There are arguments against it, but from what I've read you can cut overhead by about 20-30% by moving online. To summarize, a newspaper can take a budget cut a lot better than other services, such as transportation or health services, and it'd be nice to be provided more facts by the 'reporters' other than just a few percentages and the insinuation that it was malicious.

I understand that it _can_ be used to exert control, but to reiterate, that may have not been the intention, and I'd really like more evidence that it _was_ an attempt to limit 1st Amendment rights before all these student newspapers start squawking that it was.

Editorial: Restrictions suppress student journalism

Sirius--
Can't speak for the current administration, though I suspect they'd agree with me, but when I ran the Kansan, students had 100% to do with the content of the paper. Malcolm Gibson told us what he thought the next day, but he never had input or say in what went into the pages or onto the Web site.

Jonathan Kealing

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