Tag: First Amendment

Student newspapers fight for future despite threats

Across the country, student newsrooms are under growing pressure — facing censorship threats, funding cuts and institutional pushback. In the past two months, at least four student-run outlets have reported efforts by school administrations to restrict their operations, limit press access or sever long-standing partnerships. At Purdue University, The Exponent said the school informed staff…

FCC investigations under Trump could hurt broadcasters

President Donald Trump’s new Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr has begun multifaceted investigations of national news organizations for reasons ranging from “news distortion,” running commercial ads on noncommercial public broadcast stations, and DEI programs. The first of these investigations began two days after Trump’s inauguration.  Carr reinstated news distortion complaints against NBC, ABC and…

News Analysis: Media corporations surrender legal protections to Trump

National news organizations embolden President Donald Trump to sue them when they pay out million dollar settlements to Trump when his legal claims are weak and probably would fail in court. That is the consensus of media lawyers and scholars. The media organizations are surrendering the legal protections that New York Times v. Sullivan offers…

Digital natives in student media reluctant to give up print even when their readers already have

Before most college students in 2024 were born, the Pew Research Center was already reporting that young readers had turned away from newspapers. Older readers had not fully embraced online news yet in 2002. Only a quarter of them went to the internet for their news and then only three times a week, which now…

Newspapers are vanishing, leaving democracy at risk

Newspapers are dying. Young people aren’t reading them. Predatory hedge funds are buying them up, laying off reporters, milking them for profits and cutting home delivery. The result is that democracy is losing its eyes and ears and maybe its conscience.  That was a theme of Rick Goldsmith’s new documentary on the predatory consequences of…