Wrong message for 'free press'

Is the extra administrative oversight of Stevenson High School's student newspaper "censorship?" In a strict sense, probably not.

Is it necessary or wise? Also probably not.

An early preview of the paper may insulate District 125 administrators from some unpleasant phone calls, but it does little to advance the aim of journalism education and much to blunt it.

The first administration-reviewed edition of the student paper, the Statesman, hit the hallways last Friday. Whether the paper was better edited than previous editions or just toned down, we may never know. But it seems clear that Stevenson's young journalists will be working for the foreseeable future with the knowledge that the authorities are looking over their shoulders, and that hardly seems the way to teach them - or any of the students at Stevenson - what a free press is. Indeed, it seems quite the opposite.

In announcing their plans to exercise more control over the newspaper, administrators said they were merely concerned about "errors," "judgment" and "balance." Their goal, they insist, is not censorship but, in the words of one, "the appropriate way to produce a paper."

Sorry, but that sounds awfully Orwellian to us.

It's not as though the Statesman had been operating with reckless abandon. The nationally and state-recognized paper is reviewed by a faculty sponsor, and students receive grades for their work. Administrators themselves did not - at least not publicly - accuse the paper or its editors of irresponsibility, merely a need for more balance and judgment.

Surely, those are issues Stevenson's journalism teachers and the Statesman's sponsor could emphasize. When administrators take the task upon themselves, they send a message to the newspaper and its readers that the work of their press is not the unfiltered work of its editors and reporters, but authorized work filtered through the people in power.

This is not to say we endorse everything the Statesman prints or its every approach to sensitive topics. But we also don't endorse an authoritarian clampdown on a press - even a student press - that approaches sensitive topics.

So, it will be interesting to watch how the paper takes on difficult subjects of high school life - subjects like sex or drug use - in the months ahead. If administrators are to be trusted, such subjects still will not be forbidden but simply will be handled more objectively.

That is small comfort, at least. But it relies on two significant assumptions - one, that administrators will indeed stay out of the business of generating or suppressing story ideas and two, that readers of the paper can believe that.

A truly free press is always skeptical of both such assumptions, and truly free readers should never have to embrace them. They have the paper there in front of them; they should be able to judge its credibility and veracity for themselves. These, unfortunately, are lessons that readers and producers of the Statesman now must always consider with some doubt.