All the News That’s Fit to Print
In the Los Angeles Times roundup of new legislation coming into effect in California this year, I noted a quick aside about SB 1370, which is actually a pretty major event, and I thought it deserved more comment than “prohibits discipline of high school and college journalism advisors for the content in a student newspaper,” which is all that the Times deigned to say about it. Although that statement is an accurate summary, it doesn’t address the reasons that the bill needed to be passed, and how awesome it is that the bill passed.
High schools and colleges are an interesting position, from a constitutional standpoint. Although the Supreme Court has affirmed on numerous occasions that students are entitled to the same rights as the rest of us, many colleges stifle civil rights, especially the right to free speech, in the name of safety and order. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in school newspapers, where students have been expelled or penalized for writing relevant commentaries, teachers have been punished for printing controversial articles, and staffers have been pushed to remove articles from school newspapers.
Under the terms of SB 1370, schools will no longer be able to punish staffers who support student rights to free speech. This is huge. It means that journalism teachers, English instructors, and other student advocates no longer need to be afraid about sticking up for their students, and it enforces the idea that free speech is an important value in America, and that free speech matters, hugely.
Our high school newspaper was never really censored (to my knowledge), although one article I wrote garnered me an assortment of threatening phone calls and one assault (all from people outside the school community, incidentally). But I know a lot of people who have been affected by restrictions of their free speech while working on student newspapers, and that makes me angry, because school is supposed to be a place for learning, and learning to be a citizen is an important part of growing up.
School administrators get nervous (understandably) when controversial topics come up. Much of the abridgement of press freedoms in California schools has less to do with controversy, though, than it has to do with dissent. Students who publish editorials about school policy have been penalized, and instructors who have refused to withdraw critical or educational editorials informing students about their rights under the law have been retaliated against by administrators.
I think that student journalists need to be held to the same accountability in terms of sourcing, avoiding libelous statements, and so forth that conventional journalists are. And I also think that they are entitled to free speech, even if administrators and other students don’t like what they have to say, because that’s what this country is supposedly all about: educated and informed dissent.
Needless to say, I am pleased as punch that SB 1370 passed, and that California has made a small step in the right direction for youth rights, by affirming a right which should have already existed.
I wrote for school newspapers in high school, college, and med school and edited the med school paper for a while. I don’t know that I was ever censored but, at one juncture, it was pointed out to me that I had a younger brother who was also applying to that school. So, yes, I support whatever it takes to protect student journalists.