First Amendment

Los Angeles City College (LACC) administrators are battling with the students’ school newspaper staff over a plan to include the newspaper’s budget with the student activities department. The possibility of this happening worries the newspaper staff because they believe that if this happened, it would give the administrators an opportunity to review the content o the paper before it is distributed. The staff believes that the school administrators might attempt to censor or alter the content of the paper to their own liking and approval.
The paper’s faculty advisor believes that including the paper in the activities department is an attempt by the administration to take command of the content included in the newspaper. The advisor stated that she was told by the administration that they would be looking at the content. The advisor is worried, saying that she thinks that the administrators’ power over the paper would deter students from wanting to work in the school newspaper.
The editor-in-chief of the school newspaper is afraid that the content will be biased if the administrators included their budget with the budget of student activities. The editor-in-chief believes that the problem would be that the administrators would be editing all of their content. The paper would basically no longer be in the hands of the news staff.
This is a violation of the first amendment right to freedom of the press. The newspaper staff have the right to post their own content without being censored or reviewed by the school administration. The administration has no right to regulate the content of the newspaper. The seemingly innocent plan of the administration to include the budget of the newspaper with the budget of the student activities department is simply the administration attempting to find a way to censor and edit the content of the paper without causing a lot of controversy. The newspaper staff is making the right decision by trying to prevent this from happening.

Nick Hobbs