A school newspaper’s main job is to fairly report on the happenings at the school and that job is impeded when reporters are denied entry or interviews with school staff.
The issue of reporters getting pushback for trying to report on school events has persisted through the spring semester.
A healthy relationship between school and press freedom is important for any college and after many years of a civil relationship with the school paper, Long Beach City College has created a rift between the two sides.
This is a major problem because the future of the newspaper rests largely on its accurate coverage of school events so being denied interviews is a major problem.
Aside from these actions violating the California Education Code, some are even illegal such as denying reporters entry to public events which violates reporters first amendment rights.
The school trying to censor the news output is unusual and raises the question of what LBCC is trying to stop the newspaper from covering.
This would make sense if there was a negative pattern of unfair coverage but there has been little conflict between the college and newspaper up to this point.
In order to support the education and training of student reporters at LBCC, the college needs to be more cooperative with reporters and understand student reporters’ legal rights.
If the college fails to uphold legal rights of their student reporters they risk legal action against LBCC for failing to comply with first amendment protections.
Student Health Services and Student Activities have been two programs that have tried to deny interviews to reporters at events.
Once a reporter even had an issue where a staff member told students at the event they were covering not to talk to the reporter.
These persistent issues put out an image of unwillingness to let students do work for the newspaper and pursue their major which directly hurts the students who are trying to develop their skills.
Students should let the school know they do not approve of this limiting of the journalism program and use the online non-academic complaint forms to let LBCC know that this problem is a serious one and needs to be amended.