The College Fix

College Fix readers may know that I’m co-developing a Web series about a scrappy student newspaper at a middling university.

Some of it’s based on my own experience as a student journalist, and other parts are inspired by shit like this from the Student Press Law Center:

A Canadian student newspaper could be kicked out of the campus office that it has held for 37 years, a move the paper’s editors are attributing to their critical coverage of the university’s student union.

The Imprint, the University of Waterloo’s independent newspaper, received a notice of lease termination at the beginning of May, with no warning or previous discussion, said Megan Nourse, a board member of Imprint Publications and a former student journalist at the paper.

The student union, known colloquially as Feds (how fitting), wants to stick the paper in the basement by this fall – with only half the space it enjoys now – if it won’t cough up 70 percent more in rent, Executive Editor Aliya Kanani said.

An official claims that the student union is simply evaluating which tenants deserve certain spaces “based on a number of criteria.”

One of those criteria is probably unflattering reporting:

Kanani said in an email that after the paper published a story about the Feds considering a larger-than-usual student fee increase behind closed doors, the Feds asked the Imprint to take the story down. A few days later, she said, the Feds pulled advertising money from the paper.

Nourse also said the Feds limited student journalists’ access to interviews and information.

Sadly, this is part of life for Canadian student journalists, and a reminder that Canada has no real freedom of speech:

Arshy Mann, former national bureau chief at the Canadian University Press, a national co-operative of student papers, said it’s not uncommon for student unions to “bully” student newspapers with threats to cut funding, hike rent prices, or evict the paper from its offices.

According to the Student Press Law Center, this is because Canadian students unions are “typically separate” from their universities, so in effect they are simply disciplining their members, even if they happen to be newspapers.

What the hell is a ‘state actor’?

Something similar is happening on the other side of the border too, right down to the fuzzy relationship between a newspaper and its not-quite-governmental overseers.

The College Fix reported this spring on a lawsuit against Northern Michigan University by the ousted faculty adviser and former editor of The North Wind, who claim the newspaper’s board of directors not only retaliated against them for unflattering coverage but also violated its own bylaws in the process.

That lawsuit has hit a snag with a federal judge, the Student Press Law Center reported last week:

“It does not appear that NMU regulates these students, or the Board on which they serve,” [Judge R. Allan] Edgar said in his opinion. “The board is essentially an independent entity controlled by students who are not selected or removable by NMU.”

That means the board is not a “state actor” that’s legally prohibited from interfering in editorial decisions at the paper, although one of its five members is a university official, Edgar wrote.

SPLC thinks this is BS reasoning (and violates controlling 6th Circuit precedent) because it would mean that “a group of private citizens … exercises hiring and firing authority over state employees.”

Extremism in the defense of liberty is … exactly Vice

You may be thinking, reflecting on Rolling Stone, Gawker and other less-than-ethical media outlets, why the hell you should care if a bunch of student journalists and their whiny advisers can’t report as recklessly as they want.

To which I’d answer, because we need more people like Jason Leopold of Vice News, the “wizard” of Freedom of Information Act requests and the incredibly opaque system that governs them, The New York Times reports:

He has revealed about 20,000 pages of government documents, some of them the basis for explosive news stories. …

Since the Obama administration has overseen a crackdown on government employees talking to journalists, the Freedom of Information Act has gained a new importance as a source of information. But critics accuse the government of deliberately making the process difficult — Mr. Leopold must often sue to get documents.

It costs to sue, too: Leopold was racking up thousands of dollars per FOIA suit on his own credit card for a decade before joining Vice News last year.

And the feds keep pulling shit like this:

The office of the secretary of defense, a man who runs a department with an annual budget of more than $500 billion, was reported, in 2013, not to be accepting FOIA requests because its fax machine was broken. The C.I.A.’s FOIA website has been down for some time, Mr. Leopold said, and there seem to be few signs it will be fixed. And there is one small Treasury Department office, he said, that has no working email, fax number or address, and that does not answer the phone.

Student journalists who cower under vindictive student unions and boards of directors, for something as stupid as FOIAing a Starbucks contract (in The North Wind‘s case), are not going to have the fortitude to stand up to evasive bureaucracies whose commitment to transparency is nothing more than boilerplate.

And it starts with getting shoved in a basement because you pissed off some glorified tax collectors.

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