A state senate panel in California agreed high school and college journalism teachers should be protected against unreasonable censorship and punishment for hart-hitting stories.
"Allowing a school administration to censor in any way is contrary to the democratic process and the ability of a student newspaper to serve as the watchdog," Sen. Leland Yee of San Francisco said.
In my younger years after my high school's newspaper staff published stories criticizing administration, the not-so-well-liked principal made us give our finished pages to him to review before they went to the printer. So he'd scan the paper for his name and sign it off if everything looked OK. Other aspiring journalists had the same experience.
Perhaps the most important part of journalism, if you ask me, is freedom of the press. Censoring high school and college media is teaching the wrong lesson to our future reporters.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
We had to do the same thing in our high school journalism class. The group putting out the paper two years before I got into high school wrote something that the administration obviously didn't like and from then on we had to dance around what stories we were going to write about them so that we didn't piss them off. And like your school our principal had to sign off the paper before it went to print.
Post a Comment