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As teenage journalists deal with threats to their school newspapers, they’re calling in attorneys for back up
This story summarizes reporting from theguardian.com. Read the original for full context. Wire items stay in our news sitemap for seven days. Editorial policy.
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Law — John Semley
High school journalism is often seen as a gentle apprenticeship: a place where teenagers cut their teeth on post-game reports from Friday night football or incremental updates of a student-council race. But at 17, Myesha Phukan wanted to work on something meatier. As a student reporter for the Oracle at Mountain View high school, she and a group of student journalists began methodically digging into a pattern of on-campus sexual harassment that, the reporters believed, administrators weren’t handling effectively. Over weeks of rigorous investigation, the Oracle amassed a substantial archive of evidence including screenshots, photos and witness accounts. The story investigated alleged on-campus offenders and consulted experts about the need for accountability when it comes to on-campus assault.
When Phukan and her fellow reporters asked the school’s principal for comment about the administration’s perceived inaction, tensions escalated. In several closed-door meetings, Phukan says she was warned that such an article could have “catastrophic” reputational repercussions, for the alleged offenders and the school. The original draft included descriptions of serious offenses, ranging from harassment, to attempted rape.
Oftentimes people think of censorship as physically pulling a story from a paper. But it can come in the form of funding cuts
According to Phukan, the administration stated their belief that the Oracle’s reporters should be concerned with casting the school in a “positive light”. The reporters on the paper felt immense pressure to revise the story, which eventually they did. The name of an alleged repeat harasser was removed (with the administration citing fears of jeopardizing that student’s mental health) and critical details about on-campus assaults were also removed. Detailed accounts were replaced with more vague descriptions and quotes from female students and expert sources were pared back. “We significantly self-censored and watered it down,” Phukan says.
Despite these concessions, Phukan says, the school responded to the article by re-assigning the Oracle’s faculty journalism adviser, tenured teacher Carla Gomez, and slashing the school’s Introduction to Journalism course, citing low enrollment. In response, Phukan and Gomez called the Student Press Law Center (SPLC), a non-profit that defends the press freedoms of student journalists in the US.
“When this happened, I didn’t even realize what censorship even was, or the extent,” Phukan says. “Oftentimes people think of censorship as physically pulling a story from a paper. But it can come in the form of funding cuts, or intimidation.”
The SPLC connected the student journalists with local legal counsel via their attorney referral network. The Oracle’s journalists filed a lawsuit against the school, accusing the administration of “bullying, threatening and coerc[ing]” the journalist, and punishing their adviser through reassignment.
The complaint, filed in the Santa Clara county superior court, accuses Mountain View’s principal, Kip Glazer, of exercising “her authority and position to exert enormous and unlawful pressure” over the paper and its writers. Their filings in the civil lawsuit claim that the administration’s actions stand in violation of both education code (in the case of censoring the students) and state labor law (in the case of reprimanding the newspaper’s faculty adviser).
Although Mountain View Los Altos high school district did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian. Lawyers representing Glazer and the Mountain View Los Altos high school district would also not comment on ongoing litigation, beyond noting that they have recently filed for a summary judgment to dismiss all charges, maintaining that the article in question contained “actionable defamation” and that the school “lawfully limited student speech to maintain professional standards”.
They may well have to prove that in court. The lawyers representing the students, told a local paper that they were “feeling pretty confident” about the case and prepared to take it “all the way to trial”.
The Oracle’s hard-nosed investigative reporters aren’t the only ones making calls to the SPLC. Requests related to active censorship of articles and editorial content were up 17% in the past academic year. “We’ve seen an explosion of calls coming into our hotline,” says Mike Hiestand, SPLC’s senior legal counsel.
The SPLC isn’t the only group taking an interest in threats to the student press. The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), also runs the Student Press Freedom Initiative (SPFI). These groups have become more prominent at an auspicious time. The Trump White House has proven incredibly hostile to journalism, from personal attacks on individual journalists, to sustained criticism of news organizations which the US president paints as, “the enemy of the American people”.
According to Hiestand, this broader, politicized attitude towards the traditional arteries of the fourth estate have a knock-on effect on student journalism, even at the high school level. “It has an impact,” he says. “It’s hard to avoid that trickle-down effect, when [journalists] are called the enemy of the people.”
Related: Blocked, censored, jailed or laid off: why it’s never been harder to be a journalist
“Student journalists can experience threats from all angles,” says Marie McMullen, the program director and lead counsel of Fire’s SPFI. “They’re facing the same media law and press concerns that journalists out in the field are facing, such as defamation. They’re navigating complicated media law concepts [like] reporters at national publications. And they’re also facing pressure from within their own walls.”
The SPLC says that stories about high school students protesting against ICE and CBP actions were the most commonly censored articles across the student press this year. At the post-secondary level, the SPLC has observed a big uptick in censorship around stories concerning Israel’s ongoing war against Palestine, and coverage of Palestinian solidarity protests.
Hiestand of the SPLC says that the group’s hotline was overwhelmed with calls when the Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk was snatched off the street by plainclothes ICE agents near her home in Massachusetts, and detained in Louisiana without charge – all in an apparent response to a school newspaper op-ed criticizing Israel’s military actions in Gaza. “We’ve been dealing with issues we’ve never had to deal with, at least on this sort of scale,” says Hiestand.
While most of these cases never go public, the SPLC made headlines earlier this year in a high-profile case. A Marin county, California, woman threatened to sue a school district, after teenage journalist Ben Mueller published an article linking her to the disgraced child abuse trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Mueller was merely completing a journalism assignment, where he scoured the Epstein files for any mention of his local town. In the easily searchable files released by the Department of Justice, he discovered emails between Epstein and a local woman associated with an area modeling agency. Mueller claimed that this woman had been “providing models to Epstein” in a post on the Instagram of the Redwood Bark, the award-winning student newspaper of Redwood high school in Larkspur, California. Mueller consulted the SPLC, and met school board administrators. In the end, the reporting remained intact, and the legal threat dissipated.
Under the first amendment, school newspapers are granted a lot of freedom to publish. Legally, the SPLC and Fire mostly defer to two major supreme court decisions, which have shaped the rights and privileges of student journalists in the United States.
School officials want to not ruffle any feathers and student media don’t allow them to do that sometimes
In 1969, a group of students across the Des Moines, Iowa, school district organized to wear black armbands to their schools to protest against the Vietnam war. Administrators caught wind of the action in advance, and warned the students that their protest could cause a significant disruption within their schools, and result in suspension. When the students proceeded with their plan, and were suspended, their parents sued the school for violating their children’s rights to free speech, vouchsafed under the first amendment of the US constitution. A 7-2 supreme court decision ruled that school administrators could not restrict freedom of expression under the suspicion that it may disrupt learning activities, and that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate”.
A slightly more recent case complicated the board freedoms afforded to students by the Tinker vs Des Moines decision. In 1988, students in a journalism class at Hazelwood East high school in St Louis, Missouri, published a series of articles about teen pregnancy and parental divorce in their school paper, the Spectrum. The school’s principals struck these stories before publication, on the basis that they could cause reputation damage to the school. The paper’s editor, Cathy Kuhlmeier, claimed her first amendment rights were being infringed upon. In a 5-3 decision, the supreme court sided with the administration. Because the Spectrum was funded in part by the school, the court maintained that the school’s brass had a legitimate interest in dictating its content.
“It was a much more conservative supreme court in 1988,” Hiestand says. “I think it blew every first amendment attorney’s mind. They said that principals could censor speech if that speech was ‘inconsistent with the shared values of a civilized social order’. It’s mind-blowingly vague and nebulous.”
The “Hazelwood standard”, as it is now called, looms over cases such as Mountain View. When schools, and school boards, have an active interest in funding the operations of student papers, they are entitled to exercise editorial control. That said, 18 states – including California – have since enacted legislation, typically called New Voices laws, to protect student journalism against censorious administrations. The New Voices laws, adopted at the state level, hold closer to the Tinker standard, maintaining that the student press can only be censored under a very limited range of circumstances, involving slander, libel or the unwarranted invasion of privacy.
Even with these legal frameworks, the biggest challenge to student papers is administrative timidity from institutions. Often hard-pressed, underpaid school administrators just want to keep their heads down. In such cases, groups such as the Fire’s SPFI and the SPLC seem more than happy to remind administrators of students’ rights – and their own obligations under the constitution. “School officials want to not ruffle any feathers,” Hiestand says. “And student media don’t allow them to do that sometimes. That’s a point of contention.”
Aidan McClaren, a junior at Gretna east high school in Omaha, Nebraska, a state that doesn’t have New Voices Laws.
Like many young Americans, the 17-year-old student journalist had been inundated on social media with posts and videos about US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations across the country.
For McClaren, the moment carried eerie resonances to the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920, and the internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war. A member of Gretna East’s student newspaper, the Wingspan, he channeled his feelings into an editorial cartoon.
The resulting cartoon depicts what he calls a “history factory”. Conveyor belts churn out armored police vehicles (labelled “militarized presence”) and miniature cages (labelled “detentions without charge”). The machinery of the factory is a set of spinning gears marked “bureaucracy” and “loopholes”. A young student, knapsack hung over his back, stands watching, wondering: “Why does this look familiar …?”
“I just think it’s horrible,” McClaren says of ICE’s actions. “It sucks to see people treated inhumanely.” His cartoon reflected these deep misgivings. Like many newspaper political cartoons, it was frank and unsubtle.
The moment a school teaches its students that journalism exists to protect the powerful from scrutiny, it has failed its most basic civic mission
McClaren shared the cartoon with his editors. They loved it. And they rushed it to print. There was an immediate response. Online traffic surged to the Wingspan’s website. Within 48 hours, McClaren says, he received an email from school administrators telling him and his editors that they had to remove the cartoon. McClaren says he was told the school was receiving so many complaints that administrators and secretaries couldn’t keep up with the volume. According to McClaren, one administrator suggested that the paper would need to publish a pro-ICE editorial cartoon, in the interest of editorial balance.
Whatever the rationale, the cartoon was ultimately struck from the paper’s site. Frustrated, McClaren penned an op-ed for the paper about the experience of being censored. “The moment a school teaches its students that journalism exists to protect the powerful from scrutiny,” he wrote, “it has failed its most basic civic mission.” Adding insult to injury, the school’s higher-ups intervened to censor that , too. He says the administrators claimed that they reserved “prior review” over the paper’s content. In a freshman journalism class, McClaren had learned about the SPLC. And he made the call.
The SPLC’s staff explained the finer points of the Tinker and Hazelwood decisions, saying that censorship of the cartoon didn’t seem to be justified under even the latter, more admin-friendly ruling. Fire also contacted the school district, explaining how their actions were constitutionally unsound.
A spokesperson from Gretna east high school told the Guardian that, after the controversy, the school board was working to adopt new policies that will help both student journalists and their advisers navigate coverage of more hot-button issues, and “will put the district, administrators, sponsors, and students in a better position moving forward and help eliminate confusion”.
But McClaren says they refused to share the drafted policies with the Wingspan. “It’s not what we wanted,” McClaren admits. His concern is that these new policies, and the decision-making process behind them, may well have decreased transparency, rather than improved it.
Learning to deal with the hyperlitigiousness of aggrieved sources, or censoriousness of administrative higher-ups, is great training for young journalists and reporters. The experience also looks good on a journalism school application. Oracle alum Myesha Phukan is now studying at UC Berkeley, and working on the school’s newspaper. She also helps other scholastic journalists as an intern and member of the SPLC’s New Voices program. “I want to go into first amendment and media litigation law now,” she says.
McClaren has been similarly motivated. He’s working with his journalism advisers and members of SPLC to draft new legislation, which he hopes to introduce as a ballot measure next year. “It would reverse the Hazelwood standard,” he says. “It would give a lot more freedom to high school and college students in Nebraska.”
More than meddling in scholastic politics, groups like Fire and the SPLC are protecting what they regard as a vanguard of the so-called fifth estate. Because many student-run publications are operated as not-for-profits, they are not beholden to advertisers or subscribers. Instead, they are fueled pretty much entirely by the tenacity and principles of their students and staff advisers. “These students have chosen to engage, and share their options and ideas,” Hiestand says. “It provides me with a lot of optimism. And, God almighty, we can use that now.”
When Phukan and her fellow reporters asked the school’s principal for comment about the administration’s perceived inaction, tensions escalated. In several closed-door meetings, Phukan says she was warned that such an article could have “catastrophic” reputational repercussions, for the alleged offenders and the school. The original draft included descriptions of serious offenses, ranging from harassment, to attempted rape.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · John Semley. Published 4 Sept 2026, 01:30 pm.
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