BY HANK REICHMAN Four journalists associated with an independent Moscow student magazine were sentenced April 12 to two years’ “corrective labor” for creating and posting an online video in which they defended young Russians’ freedom of assembly. Armen Aramyan, Natasha Tyshkevich, Alla Gutnikova and Volodya Metelkin, participants in the editorial collective of the journal DOXA,…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Mary Chappell, editor-in-chief of the Loyola Phoenix (Loyola University of Chicago) has a great editorial this week rejecting attacks from student protesters who objected to being reported on. The student protesters at Loyola argued: As we all know by now, 7 of our friends were arrested while protesting. Some of the…
BY JOHN K. WILSON If anyone thinks freedom of the press is safe on college campuses, two stories this week from FIRE suggest otherwise. At the University of North Texas, a right-wing nonprofit group called Empower Texas filed a Freedom of Information Act request, demanding that the university force its student newspaper to turn over…
BY JOHN K. WILSON I have written a new study about freedom of the press on campus that has been released today, a product of my 2019–20 fellowship with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. The study includes a survey of policies for professional media at the top twenty-five…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Today is Student Press Freedom Day, which promotes the importance of protecting the rights of student journalists. Today was also the start of questioning in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, where a key issue has been Trump’s extraordinary efforts to obstruct Congress and silence government employees by banning them from revealing the truth…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important decision for freedom of the press and free speech on campus in The Koala v. Khosla, reversing a deeply mistaken lower court ruling. The 9th Circuit ruled that a public university cannot ban funding to student publications, particularly not in reaction…
BY HANK REICHMAN Nestled in the Rocky Mountains north of Salt Lake City, Utah State University (USU) is known for its agriculture, education and space research programs. In 2008, the Charles Koch foundation gave USU $25,000 every year for one “Koch professor” and the same stipend for each of four “faculty junior professors.” The agreement…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY When some conservative media outlet contacts you, with a picture of a lecture slide or assignment from your course, implying a bias against their conservative agenda, do you respond? If so, how? I am not imagining a hypothetical scenario. The headlines of conservative websites such as Campus Reform and College Fix suggest…
BY JOHN K. WILSON Last week, the Loyola Phoenix, the student newspaper of Loyola University Chicago, published a remarkable editorial about the repressive media policy on campus. Loyola’s communications spokesperson, Evangeline Politis, had written to the student newspaper recently, angry that student journalists had dared to ask questions to faculty and staff at Loyola: “This…
BY HANK REICHMAN On September 6, 2018, the student newspaper at the University of North Alabama (UNA), The Flor-Ala, reported that the school’s administration had improperly withheld public documents about the resignation of the vice president of student affairs. A week later, the student journalists, members of the communications department, and The Flor-Ala media adviser…