Free Speech, Free Society
Last year, I participated in the “We the People” essay contest, where I attempted to understand the fundamental rights we as a democratic society have, and the safeguards a free press provides for said rights. I did in-depth research on the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and how it threatened students’ First Amendment rights in a way similar to the Tinker v. Des Moines case, which I later developed into a full news story. I also discussed the unjustifiable acts of the Ukraine invasion, and the budding Chinese-Russian alliance, comparing the First Amendment rights of these two countries to America. I shared this article with my journalism class, and my advisor has used it as an example of effective, informative news writing.
Link to Article: Free Speech, Free Society
Link to Article: Free Speech, Free Society
Spreading Awareness about Journalism Ethics
Journalistic ethics can be a difficult subject to introduce students to. Naturally, we teach students to fact-check and not spread misinformation or plagiarize, but it can be more difficult to explain the fairness and impartiality and humanity that come with reporting. Imua is a wonderful opportunity for students to express their beliefs on current issues, whether they be political, cultural, or environmental in nature. But with that power comes the responsibility of writing ethically and providing coverage to all sides of a story. A slide show presentation isn’t enough to fully explain the magnanimity of this responsibility, so I allow staffers to evaluate themselves at the end of the quarter… they reflect on their work and fill out a Google Survey judging how true they’ve stayed to their journalistic ethics.
It’ s a great chance for self-reflection, to let themselves know what work they still need to do, and with this information I can help them over the course of the year.
It’ s a great chance for self-reflection, to let themselves know what work they still need to do, and with this information I can help them over the course of the year.
Learning About Journalistic Rights
At the Al Neuharth Free Spirit Conference last summer, I had the opportunity to listen to and interview Ruby Shamir, the award-winning co-author of Chasing the Truth: A Young Journalist‘s Guide to Investigative Reporting. From her, I learnt the importance of following through with a story, using respectable journalism tactics to publicly document concealed wrongdoing. The lessons in courage, fighting for stories that were too invaluable to go unheard and checking your own biases to find those ground-breaking stories are lessons that I presented to my class in a slideshow and continue to emphasize every day. It’s vital that my staff members learn to use their journalistic power to write about worldly issues, not only to educate our school community, but to give them practice for the real-world, where they’ll take the tools they learnt regarding free speech and use them to stand up and talk about social injustice.
Political Articles
After completing so much research on the First Amendment, I became interested in writing political news articles. Previously I’d preferred to write feature stories and campus news, but I felt inspired to expose my peers to this global level of news that would challenge them to analyze and re-interpret the news they were already consuming. Most peoples’ news feeds are curated to their tastes, and they tend to follow and like news that appeals to their personal beliefs, making the algorithm continue to feed them political views that align with their own. Each of my political articles is written with news literacy in mind— I want students to think critically about what I’m writing, and that means fact-checking, interviewing people with differing political views, and constantly checking my own biases.