Defending student journalists
IN RECENT months, millions of dollars in donations have rained down upon journalism organisations, prompted by President Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on the news media and citizen support for the press’s role in America’s democracy.
That’s been great news for worthy recipients like the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, ProPublica and others.
But one tiny outfit, working out of a windowless Washington, DC, office, has not benefited. That’s unfortunate since its constituency – high school and college journalists – is far bigger than the number of professional journalists.
“There are probably three times more journalists in America working for school credit than for a paycheck,” said Frank LoMonte, a freespeech lawyer and the executive director of the nonprofit Student Press Law Center.
Thousands of times a year, student journalists in crisis call the SPLC. They may have had a camera confiscated or had their public-records requests denied or be facing censorship.
“We’re like the public defenders for student journalists,” LoMonte told me. They respond to every request, and never charge a fee.
The problems cut across ideology and political lines.
LoMonte helped a reporter at the student newspaper at New Jersey’s Kean University as she tried to pry loose a surveillance video the university’s police were wrongly withholding. Once the reporter had the video, she wrote a story that brought to light a former student’s claim he suffered excessive force and racial profiling in a 2013 arrest by campus cops.
At an Omaha high school, the student newspaper wanted to publish a column suggesting that teachers keep their politics out of the classroom. It observed that some of them were trash-talking President Donald Trump, using words like “Nazi” and “Hitler”.
The school administration found the story unacceptable. Then, when students tried to write about the censorship, that story was killed, too. With SPLC’s intervention, both pieces were published – and won a state high school journalism award
In Lafayette, Louisiana, a high school principal decided that a yearbook page on a student’s gender transition was “inappropriate”.
The student, Scotty Jordan, told me the yearbook page might never have been published without the centre’s involvement. “We really didn’t know what to do, so they helped us a lot,” Jordan said.
The group is meeting a critical need and doing it on a shoestring, said Andy Alexander, Cox News Washington bureau chief and a former Washington Post ombudsman.
“Student journalists often lack the sophistication or the financial means to fight back against things like unlawful censorship or denial of access to public informa- tion,” said Alexander.
On the high school level, censorship tends to be the biggest issue. For college journalists, it’s getting access to public records.
But LoMonte said, “There’s a grab bag.”
“I’ve gotten people out of jail, I’ve gotten cameras back from police – this is an urgentlevel service,” said LoMonte.
Founded in 1974, the centre works in a spartan rented office in northwest Washington. The four-member staff, which includes paid interns and law students, not only responds to crises but sends a network of more than 200 lawyer-volunteers from all corners of the country to do workshops for student journalists, intended to prevent problems before they arise.
Laws that help professional journalists do their jobs – including freedom-of-information and shield regulations – often apply to student journalists. But in school-censorship situations, LoMonte often begins with a practical, rather than legal, argument: That schools would be acting in their own self-interest to let students publish because, in the social media era, they’ll find a way to get their message out in some other (perhaps less accurate) form, anyway.
Meanwhile, the centre is leading a grass-roots effort to get states to pass legislation giving student journalists protections for gathering and publishing news of public concern.
It all takes money, but the centre’s budget of $650,000 “has been stuck there forever”, LoMonte said, with funds coming from foundations and individuals.
Student journalists, said LoMonte, are doing “really high-end, sophisticated, societally important work” on topics including drug addiction, sexual assault and free speech on campus.
And, as Nieman Reports wrote recently, college journalists are both benefiting from their extended online reach and struggling with university administrations who want to keep a lid on controversies.
That means more legal challenges to come. For LoMonte, the solutions may not always be clear, but the mission certainly is.
“If you’re not defending student journalists,” he said, “you’re not defending journalists.”