Just realized the student newsroom has a speech policy I never read

Last week I was helping my niece move into her dorm at Ohio State. She showed me the student newspaper's style guide, which is public online. I always figured campus papers just print whatever they want, but there's a whole section about what they won't run. Letters to the editor get rejected if they attack a student by name, even with evidence. I never knew that. It surprised me because the whole point of a campus paper is to be the loudest free speech spot on campus. She said the policy was written after a 2019 incident where someone got doxxed in an op-ed. They chose safety over pure expression. Has anyone else read their campus paper's actual rules and found something that changed how you saw the whole free speech debate?

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williamh6518d ago

That policy might not be as cut and dry as it sounds. Funny thing is, most campus papers have those rules for years before anyone reads them, and they usually borrow from the Society of Professional Journalists code. A 2019 doxxing incident sounds bad, but the real reason those rules exist is liability. The university can get sued if a student gets hurt from something printed, so the paper is basically forced to act like a cautious middleman. It's not really about safety over expression, it's more about the school protecting its own wallet. Once you see that, the whole "loudest free speech spot" idea gets a lot messier, because the paper is never truly independent to begin with.