Shirtless Guys Mean No Freedom of Press

By Belle Kim, feature editor of Fused

In an article called “Photos of shirtless males cut from yearbooks on principal’s orders,” SPLC staff writer Joanna Brenner discusses an unwarranted censorship and blatant disregard of the freedom of speech and press that took place in Chatooga High school, Summerville. The new adviser of Chatooga’s yearbook brought to the attention of the principal four pages of a yearbook complied the year before under a different adviser, which contained photographs of shirtless boys playing basketball. After discussing these photos with the first-year principal Jimmy Lenderman, she cut the pages out of each copy of the yearbook that had already been bought by staff and students.

Tyler Barker, the photographer who had taken the pictures that were cut, confronted the adviser, who told him that one of the photos had drug-related implications. The photo showed a smiling male student holding a cell phone and money. To the adviser, that apparently held drug-related implications.

The censorship of those photos led to many complaints from students, who posted their thoughts on facebook and emailed former adviser Dr. Alan Perry. Perry was scandalized that the students’ first amendment rights had been so blatantly ignored and taken away. He remarked that there hadn’t been anything offensive about the cut photos at all, and that many yearbooks from the past had pictures of shirtless boys in it; but in all of his 27 years as an adviser, he had never had censorship problems, nor submitted any page to the administration. Perry put up scanned images of the pages that were cut out on facebook so that students could access them.

Worrying that her position might be threatened, or wanting to look good to the adminstration, the new yearbook adviser actually collaborated with the principal, instead of protecting the freedom of press. She took away the first amendment rights of students at the high school. Lenderman completely supported her and in that way showed that he did not care about preserving the rights of his students. He said that the photos “did not represent the way that we want our school portrayed, and the way the community values itself,” and thus felt completely justified in cutting out those pages that students had labored over.

There are definitely many things that can pose a threat to the good standing of a school.

A few pictures of shirtless high school guys aren't one of them.

Teenagers will be teenagers. Having a few pictures of high school students shirtless wouldn't send across a general message that the school encourages nudity. It wasn't as if the students were being shirtless to be obscene; they were playing basketball and were trying to cool off.

If the school administration were given the power to suppress anything that they thought could potentially jeopardize their school, there would be nothing in their yearbooks.

Nothing.

What did repressing the photos accomplish?

Nothing.

By censoring those pictures, the principal managed to do the very thing that he had been trying to prevent. His actions brought upon more attention to the pictures than could ever have been placed upon them, had they been published uncensored.