Seminar Response 12-18

According to the Supreme Court, schools do have the right to censor school newspapers but is this ok? Personally I think that schools need to be very careful about what they do censor and not remove articles that contain controversial topics that may cause school disruption. The means of censoring an article on this basis is wrong and shouldn't be done. I can see it only understandable if the article is poorly written and there is lack of evidence/ research involved. But whoever is writing the article should know better as well as the newspaper advisors. Stories/ articles don't just appear in the newspaper with no one else reading over them, a lot of time is spent on each article looking for false claims (libel) and making sure that it is well written. With this in mind, all of the time spent into a well written article, why should it be censored? The readers of the newspaper should have access to these controversial topics to learn more to make their own decision on the issue. Like the article on racism in the school dress code, if there was a lot of research done and the article was not bias (which journalism is not supposed to be) then why censor it. If the problem exists in the school and someone has noticed, it should be taken care of. Also not all school newspapers are funded by the school. The printing costs is paid for by the newspaper class/ account. In the beginning of the year we sell subscriptions and put ads in the paper to help fund the printing costs. We are not the only school that has done this either, there are lots of schools that do the same thing. Within the last year, our newspaper has covered a lot of controversial topics such as drugs, sex, and religion in the school. These topics need to be covered and readers (students) should be learning about them in order to be successful after high school by having knowledge on these topics. So why a school would want to prevent their students from learning about these topics is beyond me as long as they are written according to true journalism ethics and are not subjective or bias. So as long as student journalists are practicing good journalism ethics and put a lot of time into their story (which every student should want to do anyway,) their work should not be censored.

Michael Moore in his documentary “Bowling for Columbine” used the Socratic Method to get the most information out of interviews and sources for the purpose of the documentary. Since Moore is researching/uncovering a huge topic that is multi-sided and very complex, his questions have to be the same way. He has to prepare questions before the interview and thoughtfully consider each question to get the most information out of his sources. This includes coming up with follow up questions during an interview that he can't plan for. All of this he did in the movie, when he was interviewing the head guy of the NRA, he had some pretty tough questions that left him speechless for a few moments. He asked questions like “why is this the problem” and “What is different about America.” It was questions like these that gave Moore the answers that he was looking for. In the book Dialogues of Plato Socrates does this same line of questioning/ reasoning when he is on trial for his life. He asks thought out thought provoking questions aimed right towards your brain. And it’s these good questions that we have to think about before answering that are the best ones.