While student journalists and advisers are being censored and punished around the country, 18 states have joined in passing New Voices Acts to protect students’ journalistic freedoms. These states are starting to understand that a lack of student press protections jeopardizes the integrity and safety of student journalists.
Under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, all public educational institutions are required to respect students’ freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Despite this obligation, many universities have policies in place that violate the First Amendment rights of student editors of campus media by requiring that the media be reviewed by school administrators prior to publication.
This prior review came from the Supreme Court cases Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier (1988) and Hosty v. Carter (2005) (2006). In Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the Supreme Court of the United States determined that prepublication administrative review of a high school student newspaper was justified where the school newspaper is “school-sponsored” speech and when the prepublication review was related to “reasonable pedagogical concerns.” The case Hosty v. Carter extended this same reasoning to college and university campus media.
These laws gave way to punish students and advisers who did not follow the school’s suggestions after they underwent a prepublication review. We have seen these Supreme Court decisions directly affect student publications locally and recently. The University of Texas at Dallas’ The Mercury was imposed upon by school officials after covering pro-Palestinian protests. According to the students’ new newspaper, The Retrograde, The Mercury’s adviser was demoted, and Editor-in-Chief, Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez, was ousted.
Indiana Daily, the student newspaper at Indiana University, wrote an article saying that they were pressured to only cover specific events on campus. According to the article, the newspaper’s adviser was fired after resisting pressure and halting their publication.
In August, Stanford University made national news when the publishers of the student newspaper, the Stanford Daily, sued the Trump administration after two former writers shared concerns that they would be deported as a result of the administration’s new immigration policies.
Within the Richland Chronicle’s newsroom, noncitizen staff writers have started expressing concerns and have turned down opportunities, especially when pursuing political stories reporting on criticism of the Trump administration’s policies, particularly when working on stories related to local ICE raids or conditions in Gaza.
In our opinion, freedoms established in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution should be protected for every person in the United States. Everyone, regardless of immigration status. This is clarified in the 14th Amendment in the Equal Protection Clause, which prohibits the State from depriving “any person within its jurisdiction of the equal protection of the law.”
As more student journalism organizations face difficulties, the freedoms laid out in the First Amendment are continually challenged. In the wake of this, the Student Press Law Center’s advocacy movement, New Voices, whose goal is to “protect student press freedom with state laws,” as stated on their website, has gained more traction across the nation.
North Dakota passed the first law to be called New Voices in 2015. According to the SPLC website, this specific law protects public high school, middle school and public college student journalists from censorship and protects them from retaliation against advisers who refuse to infringe on their students’ free press rights. According to the New Voices website, California and Massachusetts are two states that do not specifically have New Voices Laws but rather have several different laws that create the same protections for students and publications.
These protections are necessary for student journalists to not only preserve their integrity when reporting, but also to provide students with an environment to report truthfully and without the threat of retaliation. To end the fear that students and advisers have, Texas should join the other 18 states in enacting New Voices or similar laws.
-Editorial Board
