N.Y.’s tongue-tied student journalists
Imagine if the Daily News had to send all its articles to Mayor de Blasio before publication. That piece about Bo Dietl’s election announcement? Gone. And say so long to mentions of state and federal investigators chiding the mayor for his fund-raising tactics.
Sound crazy? That’s essentially the situation facing high school journalists around the state: Principals have the right to look at news before it’s published in the school paper or website.
Ten states in the U.S. provide student journalists First Amendment rights that apply to every other writer and reporter in America. New York, the media capital of the world, is not one of them.
Which means that the adults who run schools are free to kill stories when they might uncover embarrassing truths.
Under the 1988 Supreme Court decision Hazelwood School District vs. Kuhlmeier, principals are allowed to censor student work if it is poorly reported, has egregious errors or is disruptive to the learning environment.
But from the newspaper advisers I’ve talked to, that is not what’s happening. One principal cut a movie review because he found the writer’s opinion of the film to be disrespectful. Some administrators are rewriting large portions of articles to make the school look better. Others just sit on a preview copy for weeks, holding up publication and diluting relevance.
Image-motivated school censorship is harmful to students’ learning, leadership and longterm relationship with authority. And it sends exactly the wrong signal at a time when the press is under attack by our President as enemies of the people and we need to seed future journalists to keep our democracy strong.
The problem goes beyond explicit suppression of controversial news and views.
Student journalists too often are subtly steered away from even minor controversial topics by their advisers because the principals won’t allow “negative” stories.
This becomes internalized, learned behavior where students begin to censor themselves and their ideas. Why suggest a topic when you know the adviser won’t allow it? Why even think about an idea when you won’t bother sharing it?
That’s where New Voices legislation, under consideration in state legislatures across the country, comes in. It would revert laws to honor the less restrictive approach to free expression in school that the Supreme Court decided on in 1969’s Tinker vs. Des Moines — in which the court set a different standard of review, that administrators may not censor content just because they don’t like it.
Tinker wasn’t a free-for-all. Students would still have to uphold proper journalistic ethics and practices. But it did ensure basic freedoms.
Nine states currently are debating New Voices bills in their legislatures. New York is not one of them yet.
Recent happenings at elite Townsend Harris High School in Queens should seal the argument for reform here.
Reporters at the school’s student newspaper have been indirectly accused of spreading “fake news” by a Queens superintendent’s representative. That’s because they have been doggedly reporting on the interim principal there, who has been widely described as “condescending” and “rude.”
What lessons are young people learning when authority figures sink to dismissing their hard work with inaccurate name-calling?
Most New York student journalists couldn’t have gone as far with the story as Townsend Harris’ did. The school has a special charter that prevents administrative oversight.
In my journalism classes, I often share the well-known quote from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” We talk about what that means for journalism: the solemn responsibility to expose wrongs and keep decision-making transparent.
For New York high school journalists, this is about much more than just complaining about lunch and homework or protesting student lounge hours. It’s about real lives, real stakes — and real lessons about truth-telling and accountability that will pay dividends for the future of our democracy.