STUDENT NEWS CENSORSHIP: A REAL WORLD LESSON

"Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted."
- Albert Einstein

Kudos to the Chicago Tribune for defending student journalism (see "Muzzling students" at http://tinyurl.com/yaur3g4).

Excerpt:
"The last time student journalists at Stevenson High School ruffled the school's administration, all 3,400 issues of the Statesman disappeared from the campus before students arrived for their classes. This time, administrators stopped the presses.

"Officials at the Lincolnshire [Illinois] school balked at publishing a story about drinking and smoking by honor students. In a written statement, school officials said the article ‘featuring anonymous sources discussing illegal activity was not fit for print.’ Student editors wanted to the leave the front page blank, except for a note explaining that the story intended for that spot had been yanked. Administrators wouldn't allow it..."

Today in a new coffeehouse open late called Nikki's Cafe in the college town of Beloit, Wisconsin, owner Lloyd Smith talked with me about a similar incident at a liberal arts school newspaper in Iowa. There, an enterprising investigative reporter discovered poor investments crippling that college's endowment. The story ran, he said. Heads rolled, people lost jobs. And the administration took control of the newspaper from students, instead giving it to English Department faculty with instructions about what to restrain and what to allow. The paper, Smith said, didn't carry any edgy news after that.

The Chicago Tribune called that kind of thing "censorship." Teaching, according to Harvard University Gurney Professor of English and Comparative Literature James Engell in a personal interview with me, "means losing control sometimes. It means going too far sometimes, because if you don't go too far, students will never go far enough.”

He said a liberal education, “must entail faith in oneself, proving oneself to be useful, whatever that turns out to be.” The students at Stevenson High School and in Iowa believed their work had significance and thus high value. They displayed characteristics found in the best investigative reporters and editors.

The bible on investigative reporting - Investigative Reporting and Editing, by Paul Williams – describes what aspiring investigative reporters are up against. “To undertake such a role, of course, smacks of impudence. Persistent questioning of accepted mythology upsets the high priests. The investigative reporter consciously chooses to get in harm’s way, and his [sic] reward is about equal parts of pain and pleasure. He is practicing what David Kraslow calls ‘high risk’ journalism. He is raising moral issues. He is pointing out conflicts and contradictions,” Williams wrote.

“Investigative reporting is an intellectual process," Williams said. "It is the business of gathering and sorting ideas and facts, building patterns, analyzing options, and making decisions based on logic rather than emotion - including the decision to say no at any of several stages."

Those are skills liberal arts schools pride themselves in cultivating. According to Engell, the value of a liberal arts education is, "to learn critical inquiry. This means grasping systems by which the mind analyzes, describes and alters the world and its own self.

“Action is what finally matters. Informed and considered action matters most. The liberal arts and sciences have always been thought suited to people who are free, at liberty, not indentured or apprenticed to some trade or master. As its suffrage has grown, it has spread from a small elite to a more democratic dispensation, and there is, as far as I can tell, no limit set by nature to the expansion of its suffrage."

What is the right action to take by the students in these cases? To help answer that question for myself, I looked further into Engell's words, Williams' insights, and case studies of censorship.

Engell said, "In the end, liberal education will politicize. If students graduate believing that they can live and work meaningfully while aloof or insulated from the political process, then, even if we've given them high grades for diligence, research and knowledge, we have failed them - spectacularly.”

Journalism, he said, "will not put you in a zombie state." As such, "it should be part of a liberal education. It can pop up in writing courses. Really good journalism is really good writing."

Whether you agree or disagree with the administrative decisions made, the students in both cases received a real-world education from the experience. Case in point from the book, MediaMaking, by Lawrence Grossberg, Ellen Wartella and D. Charles Whitney. They write, “In the late 1980s, a small group was organized as the Parents’ Music Resource Center. The PMRC, sometimes identified in the press as a group of Washington, D.C. housewives, was credited with forcing the recorded music industry into self-regulation. How could such a tiny organization exert such influence over a multibillion-dollar industry? A large part of the answer is who PMRC’s leaders were: “Tipper” Gore, the wife of Al Gore, and Susan Baker, the wife of James Baker, who has served in several Cabinet posts. These kinships were sufficient to guarantee access to, and extensive coverage by, the national news media. These political connections suggested to the recording industry that if it did not undertake self-censorship, more direct and energetic intervention by the federal government might follow. …In short, the episode illustrates an example of the flexing of institutional power – an implied threat of governmental restraint.”

The students who chose to get in harm’s way wrote about the human condition and questionable management of donated funds. Then they met versions of Tipper Gore and Susan Baker. I encourage the students to persist, to not be discouraged by their dose of real life. I encourage them to find their way into the nonprofit online havens for investigative reporting, including ProPublica, ePluribusMedia (a citizen journalism site), The Center for Public Integrity, the advertising and reader supported TalkingPointsMemo.com and local investigative reporting sites such as the new Investigate West at http://invw.org. That is the action to take.