The Outstater
The Indiana Daily Student, RIP?
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .” — First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution
THE FIRST AMENDMENT is written as clearly as humanly possible. That won’t matter, of course, to those who see earnest but callow Indiana University journalism students as a bulwark of democracy. Last week, you could hear the wailing in Bloomington as the school’s new business plan shut down the costly print edition of the ever so woke Indiana Daily Student.
The newspaper, a ho-hum phantasm of what college students imagine is crusading journalism, has managed to lose heaps of money despite a measure of operating grants, private donations and public funding that any other Indiana paper would consider lavish. Nor would most Indiana mediums expect to prosper providing a pro-Palestinian platform after the Hamas massacre.
And you can skip over the paper’s raisons d’être as a means of teaching students the basics of a journalism. Look, journalism is only nominally a career these days with trust in media approaching statistical insignificance, thanks largely to the advocacy style fashionable in J-schools. (I think it was Mark Twain who said you could learn all you need to know about journalism in two months on a country weekly.)
But overall, the paper is similar to those when I was a student editor in the 1970s, at best an effort to poke adult authority and at worst an expression of the socialist impulses of adolescence. The difference is that after several decades of onslaught by the social-justice warriors we now are experiencing radical-youth fatigue.
What is important is that neither freedom of speech nor democracy is imperiled. The First Amendment isn’t a license to be disagreeable on someone else’s dollar. The students and their faculty advisors don’t own the newspaper, the university does. They can’t force the rest of us to pay for their pretend journalese or give them access to public property. There is a reason we have the word, “sophomoric.”
Finally, it is interesting that the letter of protest from the IU journalism faculty didn’t rest on any authority so lofty as the 1787 Constitution (to which the professors may or may not owe allegiance). It cites only an internal 2024 departmental memo:
“The Journalism faculty at Indiana University are (sic) appalled by Chancellor David A. Reingold’s decision to cut the print edition of the Indiana Daily Student hours before publication. This move broke with the Student Media Action Plan, threatened the editorial independence of our student journalists and breached the core values of journalism that we discuss every day in our classrooms.”
To underscore, the Amendment doesn’t guaranteethe students anything — not their editorial independence, not protection from having their values breached or from having their feelings hurt. It only prohibits the government from abridging their right to publish their own newspaper. In this case, then, activating the attendant “freedom” would require a profitable business plan, one that markets to that slim demographic willing to pay for undergraduate fol de rol, an inflated commodity.
So, freedom of speech is not the issue. Rather, the administration might rightly argue that fiscal management is the issue, that and “donations” from outside politically interests. And again, the students forgot to actually pay for any of this themselves.
Nonetheless, there is an opportunity here. The faculty could imbue an adult understanding of liberty and its responsibilities. More specifically, they could teach that the value of journalism is in accuracy and prescience, not in ideology. It is a good bet, though, that the university will reverse itself, folding on this moral test as it has on every other one this era, which, of course, is the real problem. — tcl
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