The Carrier editorial reflects a consensus of the editorial board.
Campus Carrier editorial board
The past few weeks, intense protests at the University of Missouri have caught the nation’s attention. Racial tensions escalated as students protested the school’s inadequate responses to incidents and demanded the resignation of the school’s president.
On Nov. 9, system president Tim Wolfe and Missouri chancellor R. Bowen Loftin announced their resignations, according to the Washington Post.
The ramifications of these protests can be felt across the nation. The Washington Post of Nov. 13 reports that protests continue on college campuses “from Georgetown to Duke to Kansas to UCLA.”
Because of the spreading protests, it is important to consider the effects that they have, especially when it comes to journalism and the freedom of expression.
The First Amendment guarantees Americans the right to freedom to protest peacefully, but it also guarantees the right to free press. And yet, often during protests, journalists are censored.
USA Today of Nov. 12 reports that Tim Tai, a journalism student at the University of Missouri, was taking pictures of a tent encampment on campus when protesters attempted to block him.
Controversially, another student captured a video of an assistant professor calling for “some muscle” to help remove the students from the area.
The school’s journalism and communication schools later supported the journalists and their right to be there, according to USA Today, but this incident highlights the larger issue of censorship among protests.
The International Business Times of Nov. 14, 2014 explains that during the protests of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., reporters for the Huffington Post and Washington Post were arrested.
And while the Business Times warns that grandstanding journalists could overshadow the death of Michael Brown, it is important to note that in the year since these protests, journalistic censorship is a problem that has been largely ignored.
These arrests, while unacceptable, are understandable. The desire to downplay the chaos of the protests by censoring reporters makes sense.
But college campuses, especially state schools, should be a beacon of free speech.
Tai was attempting to photograph an encampment in a public place, and had every right to do so. In this instance, it was the protesters themselves, not police or government authorities, that attempted to censor him.
As protests sweep college campuses across the nation, it is important to remember the importance of the First Amendment.
No one should censor another person’s First Amendment rights, but especially not when they are invoking the First Amendment themselves.
Journalists, no matter the circumstances, have the right to record and document what they see, and attempting to take that away violates what America stands for.