In 1988, a principle censored a student newspaper and deleted two articles, one about pregnancy and one about divorce. He didn’t give students a chance to fix the articles, just deleted them. When he students heard, they took it to court, saying that it was impending on their rights to free speech. The court decided 5 to 3 that the principle had the right or censor he newspaper, because it was a “private forum.” The reason they called it a private forum was that it was not a space for any student to write, just the ones in the journalism class. The principal has all the rights he wants to censor the paper.
This directly relates to me because I am on the school newspaper. I am a news editor, a news a reporter, and he copy editor. Most of what I do is news, so its easy to keep my bias’s out of the writing. However, when I write or edit features, I have a hard time keeping my beliefs out of it. Even in a recent news article I wrote, an important quote had profanity in it, and I had to deiced to censor the direct quote or not. I asked my teacher, and she said that under our policy and mission statements, I couldn’t say the word fa***t in the newspaper, even if it was a quote.
I do think that this is a fair verdict for the case. The school is probably funding the paper, and so they get to decide what they publish and what they don’t. Through this decision, the principle probably saved a lot of controversy and troubles for the school, even if they did end up going to court...
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