Editing the Archives: Another College Media Conundrum
by Adam Hemphill
A few minutes ago, I read a Seattle Times story about a lawyer who wants his former college newspaper to remove an archived story about a decade-old arrest for attempted sexual assault. Quoth Romenesko:
A decade ago, Shakespear Feyissa was arrested on suspicion of attempted sexual assault. He was never charged, but the Seattle Pacific University newspaper story about the incident still comes up when his named is Googled. School officials are willing to pull the article, but student editors want none of it. Everett Herald reporter Debra Smith, who wrote the story in 1998, says: “Feyissa may not like the story, but that doesn’t mean he should get to dictate what gets removed from a newspaper’s online archive.”
That is a succinct overview of the article, but the part that caught my eye was not that the editors refuse to pull the content. (That’s their prerogative.) Instead, it was this:
When the Falcon asked the student government in April for $3,000 for a new server or Web host, the student government consulted the administration about its liability in exactly this kind of situation, said Daniel Miller, last year’s student government president.
The administration replied that first it wants the Falcon’s editor-in-chief to sign a contract giving officials access to the new server, and affirming that SPU is the publisher of the Falcon and has final say over content.
That’s something the incoming editor, Evi Sztajno, is not willing to do.
“It’s a private university — they have every legal right to come in and take this article down, but for some reason they’re asking my permission to take it down,” she said. “That’s permission I cannot give because of journalistic ethics, which, I might add, we are taught at this school.”
That is a VERY interesting situation and one that would be prudent for all of those involved in college media to contemplate. Should the need for a new server arise, will administrators gain the ethical leeway they need to make a fundamental change in how they police regulate their student media? I think not, but I’d love to hear others’ thoughts.
Comments
I have an idea about a way to handle such situations. A person such as Feyissa should be able to fax some police records or something like that to the newspaper. He should also be able to state that the report in the archives is showing up in Google searches of his name — he could send a link.
Given sufficient information such as what I just described, a news Web site could complete the fact-checking and post an update on the same 10-year-old article. That way the article does not hurt Feyissa, and the news organization isn’t in a position of having to delete the factual record. (Assuming that Feyissa’s arrest took place.)
I do not agree that it’s okay to just allow such articles to stay online, wide-open and Google-able. I’m only applying the “Do unto others” rule here — anyone might be wrongly arrested or even wrongly imprisoned. (You. Your mom. Your child.)
If Google coughs up a report of a charge or conviction without also showing any follow-up information, a person deserves a means to correct that. It could really damage a person’s reputation. Again, the “Do unto others” rule applies here.
But as for the school having any means of touching the journalists’ work — that’s a violation of the U.S. First Amendment. Administrators should never be permitted to censor, change, or delete the journalism of student publications.
“Should never,” I say. Of course, there are court precedents. See the Student Press Law Center for help.
Thank you for the input, Mindy. You make a very good suggestion with regard to how the paper or Feyissa should attempt to remedy the situation; admittedly, that was not something I thought about extensively when considering the case. Your proposal seems as though it could provide a satisfactory outcome for all of those involved.
With regard to the students’ First Amendment rights, I agree that administrators should not be permitted by law to censor student media. Unfortunately, that is not necessarily the case following Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, one of the Supreme Court precedents to which I presume you are referring.
Technology, of course, makes it more complicated. Should the need arise for a new server and the school refuses to fund it because there is no agreement in place, can that be viewed as censorship? I say yes, but the SPLC had somewhat different thoughts when my college newspaper encountered a similar obstacle in our bid to go online-only.
It’s definitely a very tough call, and it’s obvious that media law is only going to get more complicated as technology progresses.
I’ve often advocated a position similar to Mindy’s re: online corrections. Arrests and convictions are two different things. The original article shouldn’t be removed, but the information should be updated to include that “charges were never filed” or some such.
The administration access to servers is another troubling topic, and a good argument for hosting your web site off-campus.
[...] via Wikipedia Adam Hemphill writes about a recent case of an attempt by administrators to control online content for a college newspaper through a [...]
I’m coming to this conversation late but as the author of the original story, I’d like to add this to the record. There was nothing factually wrong with the original story. The accuracy of the original story wasn’t the issue. Feyissa wanted to control access to an accurately-reported story that didn’t put him in a good light today. He wanted to scrub the record.