Court Case Continues to Impact Student Journalism in Some States

Go into any speech competition, civics or government class and students are debating federal government mandates, discussing social justice issues, and giving speeches addressing world issues. Students are encouraged to explore these issues, research, and create well-written speeches and cases that support those topics, cliche hot-button topics omitted.

The opposite is true for student journalists. If a student journalist writes a story on the same topics, no matter how well-researched and unbiased, it carries the fear of censorship, public backlash and retaliatory actions of the school administration.

This double standard is due to the 1988 Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruling on the Kuhlmeier vs. Hazelwood case that effectively ended press freedom for student journalists. Now, 35 years after that ruling, student journalists face stricter and more frequent censorship, struggling in post-secondary journalism studies and advanced writing competitions.

In January 1988, SCOTUS ruled 5-3 in favor of letting schools have control to censor all school publications. “The Court noted that the paper was sponsored by the school and, as such, the school had a legitimate interest in preventing the publication of articles that it deemed inappropriate and that might appear to have the imprimatur of the school.” Currently, 33 states still function under the Hazelwood ruling with 17 states choosing the New Voices law to help combat the effects of Hazelwood. However, schools in Hazelwood states are facing more frequent censorship.

In the past few years, there has been an uptick in the number of censored stories in school papers. Stories about the fears of returning to school during the pandemic, the vaccine controversy, mask-wearing debates, the election, and the insurrection all faced some form of censorship in Hazelwood states in 2020 and 2021. In the past year, stories about LGBTQ concerns have been the leading stories to meet the fate of the censor. Sometimes, a real need to pull or revise a story, such as privacy concerns or pedagogical concerns exists, and many schools take this ruling as a free-for-all at the censorship buffet.

This is what happened in June 2023 at Northwest High School in Grand Island, Nebraska. In response to a directive from the administration that students must use their birth name in their bylines instead of their preferred names, the staff responded to this directive by running two columns and a news article addressing LGBTQ issues. The school retaliated by dissolving the entire journalism department.

This type of retaliatory behavior by school administration has caused many student journalists to skirt around social and world issues in favor of softer, less controversial stories; and while soft feature stories serve the school, the journalist never develops the ability to find a story, research, gather evidence and write about it from a student perspective.

Students and advisers often work under a veil of fear that their story will be cut, they will be reprimanded or the paper shut down and the department dissolved. Student journalists are required to write only stories that serve the administration and district’s personal beliefs and ideals and many times this means sugar-coating events or omitting negative information which makes the student violate the journalistic code of ethics to appease the administration.

All journalism publications function under the Society of Professional Journalists rules of ethics which are explicit and strict. Those rules are: seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent. Each of these has specific directives that go with them. The seek truth and report it part is suffering the most under the current state of Hazelwood.

Post-secondary institutions have reported that many students entering a journalism program cannot find and write a hard news story. They have also expressed that the students from Hazelwood states display a higher degree of self-censorship, which in turn causes the student to become unwilling to cover hard news stories for fear of backlash. Once self-censorship has become an ingrained behavior, the student is no longer concerned about fair and accurate reporting and instead focuses on how to report a story to meet the demands of the administration. It takes semesters for these students to undo the “self-censor or be censored” mindset.

This gap between schools under Hazelwood and those under the New Voices Law comes even more in focus at national writing competitions. When it comes to writing awards, stories that tackle the tougher stories will receive awards more often because the student journalist was allowed to explore and develop well thought- out arguments and learn the subtleties of hard news writing in their daily classroom routines.

School newsrooms choose to function under this law because, as seen in some of the past free speech lawsuits, the SCOTUS seems to favor diminishing students’ rights and giving more control to the school administration. Looking at the recent case, which granted students rights to their speech on social media and the mobility of schools to create rules that bend that ruling, there is a real chance that any case that makes it to the SCOTUS that there will be more restrictions on school newsrooms.

The following states have enacted the New Voices law to help overturn the consequences of Hazelwood: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia. In 2023, New Voice bills were introduced in Connecticut, Kentucky, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas. More information on the effects of Hazelwood and New Voices can be found at the Student Press Law Center.

More and more states recognize that the Hazelwood case has caused detrimental gaps in the ability of student journalists to acquire the skills necessary and that when schools are given unfettered access to censor student voices, it is ultimately the student who suffers. SCOTUS needs to fully overturn Hazelwood in favor of New Voices, but while waiting for that, there needs to be a stop to the senseless censorship of student press.