Herald should back Stevenson students

The about-face taken by the Daily Herald editorial board took two days. Your Dec. 17 editorial "strongly urging" Congress to pass The Free Flow of Information Act is a sharp contrast to your editorial call Dec. 15 for student journalists to negotiate with information flow adversaries.

For a year or more, the situation at Stevenson High School in regard to its award-winning newspaper has been a classic First Amendment issue: government censoring the content of a free press. Yes, the journalists are students, as the board and administrators of public schools are members of government. But these students have more training and take their jobs a lot more seriously than the average blogger - both groups protected under the FFIA act the Daily Herald endorses.

As a member of the Fourth Estate, the Daily Herald is right to strongly urge Congress to pass this bill. But where was your needed editorial gumption two days earlier? Where was it last spring, when a trusted, professional journalism adviser resigned her position over the same governmental interference this year's Stevenson newspaper staff is experiencing?

It's easy in suburban Chicago to tell the U.S. Congress what it should do. That's talking the talk. But when you see a local governmental body prohibiting the very information flow you say you endorse, to the point that you describe this body as exerting "heavy-handed administrative control" of a free press, that's where citizens need the Daily Herald to walk the walk. Instead, the Daily Herald editorial board belittled its journalistic younger siblings by dismissively calling their real-life example a "censorship squabble" and telling them to politely negotiate. That's a shame. Instead, you should have urged them to continue to stand up for their journalistic principals and given them the backing to do just that.

Barry Reszel

Libertyville