Politics: Freedom of the Press

The LA Times this morning has a piece on the surge in ultra-conservative underground newspapers on college campuses lately. I'm a veteran of a college paper myself, and I think it's great that there are more newspapers out there. Too often, the college newspaper is dominated by weirdos, or run entirely by one guy and his friends, like a fraternity without the dues. More words on campus mean more opinions, more dialogue and therefore more of what many people think is the quintessential college experience.

But I am concerned with the way these new college papers appear to be front organizations for conservative political shops. This immediately slashes back across the benevolence of having increased, divergent voices on college campuses. Sadly, it appears that most of the new conservative college papers profiled in the LA Times piece are all designed to serve as frontline soldiers in the right's own war on free speech. Fight fire with fire, I guess.

For instance, take this excerpt, where a seminar leader from one of the conservative organizations seeding these new right-wing papers around the country asks a student a question:

"What do you want professors to feel when you call them up?" asked Owen Rounds, a former speechwriter for Rudolph Giuliani.

"Threatened," replied Duncan Wilson, a tousle-haired 19-year-old from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

Journalism, a good journalist will tell you, shouldn't be used as a club to beat subjects over the head. If I contacted a source, I wouldn't want him or her to be threatened, I would want him or her to answer my questions truthfully, and feel like my mission, to tell a story, is important to both of us.

Consider this one:

Duncan Wilson, the UNC Charlotte student, complained that college Republicans got less than $500 in student fees this year. The campus gay club got $2,241, which was used partly to put on a show featuring drag queens, he said.

Wilson, who started college at 16, was particularly incensed at his "Marxist" sociology professor. Would it be all right, he asked, to label the man "Public Enemy No. 1?"

Most disturbing, then, is the possibility that, to exercise the free speech rights of a conservative is to indict, intimidate and harass others exercising their rights. Many of the statements made by new right-wing journal editors cleave closely to the "everybody is a leftist, so it's my turn" philosophy, but they are making an assumption that is false: There has always been room for more than one belief, and your belief doesn't need to destroy or defeat another belief to get recognition.

Finally, the bit Atrios will love:

Another difference: The conservative political organizations that train the right-wing editors are better organized than ever. The Leadership Institute, which sponsored the North Carolina seminar, is one of three organizations that train and fund conservative journalists. Founded by Morton Blackwell, a former Reagan White House operative, the institute offers to pay the costs of printing first issues.

The Collegiate Network sponsors its own competition to honor journalism excellence. And in April, it announced its sixth annual Polly awards, recognizing "the excesses of college administrators and professors."

The organizations boast that their graduates have gone on to some of the most prestigious media outlets in the nation, including Esquire magazine, CNN, Time and Newsweek, as well as major metropolitan papers. Some see such "seeding" of the news media with conservatives as a welcome check on the liberalism of mainstream papers.

"I think it's great if more young conservatives are going into journalism," said Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's media critic. Noting that journalism has traditionally attracted liberal students "who want to change the world," he said, "we can definitely use people who have different political and cultural points of view."

Since there aren't any now, Howie.