Student Newspapers: Deserving of First Amendment Protection or Vehicles for Liberal Propaganda? – Phoenix New Times

Wednesday, March 8, 2017 at 7 a.m.

High school newspapers tend to be faithful chroniclers of the mundane, featuring blow-by-blow updates from the student council, detailed reports from the past weekends volleyball tournament, and earnest editorials against littering.

But Representative David Stringer, a Republican from Prescott, worries that they could become a tool for left-wing indoctrination.

"I think it's pretty common knowledge that in many of our schools there's a strong liberal bias," Stringer said Monday in a meeting of the House Education Committee.

"And I can foresee the unintended consequence of protecting faculty members who are influencing the students or perhaps expressing their own views and biases using public resources to propagandize their own liberal views through what purport to be student publications," he added.

Stringers comments were made in reference to SB 1384, which would prevent administrators from censoring student newspapers at publicly funded schools, including high schools, community colleges, and universities.

The bill would also prevent schools from retaliating against faculty advisers who stand up for students First Amendment rights.

SB 1384 is something of a pet project for Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Yee, a Republican from Phoenix.

As a student journalist at Greenway High School in the 1990s, she'd grown frustrated that administrators routinely pulled items from the campus paper because they might potentially shed a bad light on the school.

It was interesting that Id be sitting in my government class and learning about First Amendment rights and freedom of speech, and then going on to my next class in journalism and seeing I was not able to exercise those rights, she said at an earlier committee hearing.

For the most part, the bill has gathered bipartisan support, passing unanimously through the Senate.

But Stringer seems to believe that shielding students from liberal propaganda outweighs the need to protect their First Amendment rights.

And before Stephen Miller became Trump's top policy adviser, he was writing essays with titles like "Political Indoctrination at My Public High School,"in which he complained about how his school paper had published anarticle that criticizedthe United States' military response to 9/11.

Despite Stringer's objections, the bill is moving forward.

Henry Gorton, a student journalist at Sunnyslope High School, managed to win over committee members by bringing up another issue beloved by conservatives: political correctness run amok.

He testified that hed wanted to publish a piece about Trump supporters views on illegal immigration in the school newspaper, but had been told that he couldnt because undocumented students might feel threatened.

That will get you some support here, Representative Don Shooter, a Republican from Yuma, told him.

Shooter was right: The bill passed the House Education Committee 10-1, with only Stringer voting in opposition. Its now up for a full vote in the House.

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Student Newspapers: Deserving of First Amendment Protection or Vehicles for Liberal Propaganda? - Phoenix New Times