Some of my most formative experiences involved working as a student journalist — first in high school and then in college. As someone who took seriously my responsibilities to my community, I found myself on multiple occasions in battles over the censorship of the student press.
Most memorably, when I was an undergraduate at Georgia State University, we tried to do a special issue of the paper focused on the adult entertainment sector in Atlanta. There were a large number of strip clubs, porn theaters, and other such operations not far from campus which students drove past on their way to school and we decided to provide some insight into what went on there. Inquiring minds wanted to know and all of that. When the issue hit the stands, the administration was all over our backs and the editor of the paper quickly capitulated, pulling the paper from distribution. A bunch of my friends went around collecting the papers before they could be destroyed and then we organized a group of students to distribute them in brown paper bags as a protest of the pressures put on the paper by the administration. We later ended up defending our choices as journalist before a hearing conducted by the Student Government, which had been stung by criticisms of its policies and campaign tactics and saw this issue as a chance for pay back.
Several years later, I got involved in advising a high school newspaper editor who decided to stand up to the principal and the school board who wanted to stop him from reporting news about controversies going on in his school: he took the school board into court and won what was then a fairly groundbreaking case in student press law.
All of these experiences have left me with enormous respect for the work of the Student Press Law Center, a watchdog group that monitors struggles over censorship of student produced media and provides resources for editors who want to assert their First Amendment rights. A recent visit to their site showed a range of information which seems relevant to readers of this blog.
The website reports on a recently released study on the Future of the First Amendment, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which looked into young people’s attitudes towards free expression. Among the studies findings was evidence that there has been a significant increase in the percentage of students who have studied the First Amendment in their classes (up 14 percent since 2004), that 64 percent of students favored the right of student journalists to publish what they want without prior restraint (up from 58 percent two years earlier), and that 45 percent of students (compared to 35 percent just two years ago) believe that the First Amendment “goes too far” in protecting the rights of the media. We can see this last statistic perhaps as evidence of the climate that has shaped this culture since 9/11 — where criticism of the government’s position gets read by a significant percentage of Americans as unpatriotic or “going too far.”
The site provides interesting coverage of the ways that the Deleting Online Predators Act might impact student expression, focusing on the uses of MySpace and other social networking sites for political activism:
David Smith, executive director and founder of Mobilizing America’s Youth, the Washington, D.C., based group that operates Mobilize.org, said that many students …are finding that social networking sites can be “a great tool for social activism.”
He said this was demonstrated particularly with the rallies that took place in the spring against congressional anti-illegal immigration legislation. In March, thousands of high school students across the country, including an estimated 40,000 in Southern California, walked out of school in protests, many of which were organized in part on MySpace.
“There was so much conversation, at least within the Beltway, saying ‘Where did this come from? This issue, we didn’t realize it was so hot out there, so how could you mobilize tens of thousands of young people?'” Smith said. “It seemed like it came out of nowhere, when if these people were actually on these various sites and had been able to be privy to these different conversations, they would have realized that these conversations had been happening for a long time, and because of the way social networking sites are designed, it’s easy to activate people and get them to do stuff offline as well.”
And although Mobilizing America’s Youth was not directly involved with the immigration protests, Smith said the organization uses MySpace and several other social networking sites to inform students about political issues and motivate them to get involved in the group’s campaigns. One of these causes is the Save Our Social Networks campaign against DOPA.
“There are very few members of Congress that have a MySpace account, I don’t think any of them have Facebook accounts,” Smith said. “So they have no personal connection to these networks that millions upon millions use. They have no concept of how these sites are used positively.”