PressEthic

According to Ascribe, a Public Interest Newswire:

Oak Ridge High School Principal Becky Ervin seized 1,800 copies of the Oak Leaf newspaper last week after a student columnist wrote about birth control. The principal also had qualms about an article featuring photos of students' tattoos and piercings, the Knoxville News-Sentinel reported.

The Society of Professional Journalists have condemned this practice.

The arguments of both parties are summed up as follows:

Tom Bailey, the local school superintendent said:

I would have done the same thing as a principal all the way to the end, whatever the end may be. We have a responsibility to the public to do the right thing. We've got 14-year-olds that read the [student] newspaper.

Mead Loop, SPJ's vice president for campus chapter affairs said:

In politics, the cover-up is often worse than the crime, and, unfortunately, here we have an example where a principal teaches a lesson to students that censorship is preferred to an open reading of news.

School newspapers provide for an interesting case study in ethics, because of their main audience (students under the age of 18) and because the publisher is the school itself. There are numerous issues that are presumably of interest to students, that a school wouldn’t want to be seen as endorsing.

Articles on drugs, sex, religion, race and school politics are all potentially incendiary issues. If a school press is truly free, like the SPJ suggests, situations could arise where articles are published describing how students can take drugs more safely or criticizing teachers and principles. Most newspapers printed by High Schools would no doubt look to censor such articles.

Despite this, I believe schools have a duty to teach their students about a more valuable lesson – how to function as citizens in a democracy. If this is the case, then such articles should be allowed to be published, as long as they are fair and accurate. I would suggest that if the principle or staff disagrees with the content, then they should be entitled to publish a response outlining their argument.

Teaching students that censorship is a viable method to deal with controversial material is far more egregious, than printing an article on drugs or sex.