Journalists report the facts, giving their readers and viewers the details they need to make informed decisions about their lives and the world around them. While they are usually background players, in recent weeks they have taken center stage, not as the storytellers, but as the story. During last night’s Super Bowl LIII, The Washington Post highlighted this point in an ad about the value of journalists to our democracy.
While student journalists may not be facing the exact same threats as their adult counterparts, there are serious threats to the student press, and the current anti-press environment has only made things worse. But luckily for students across America, the Student Press Law Center is ready to assist young journalists no matter their legal or ethical predicament.
As part of Free Speech Week, we’re looking back at some of the biggest moments in the history of our First Amendment right to a free press and the impacts those moments had on the press as we know it today.
At a time when the First Amendment is being tested and questioned – perhaps more than ever before – it is important that we reflect on where we are and where we are going in the face of the vast technological changes that are impacting our press and our democratic systems, especially the rise of the big tech platforms and their role in making editorial decisions previously delegated to newspaper publishers.
Journalists are out there every day on the front lines to uncover the facts and understandings that will allow us to find our way back to a more productive democracy where decisions can be made based on mutually agreed-upon facts.
Today, newspapers fought back against President Trump’s attacks on the media in the the best way they know how: they took to the presses. In a unified voice, they called for an end to these attacks and stressed the importance of quality journalism and a free press to hold our government officials accountable.
The News Media Alliance condemns Ayla Albayrak’s sentence and supports the Wall Street Journal in the appeal.
For Free Speech Week, I was going to write about the political climate in the US, but there is an even more egregious attack on the free press happening right now. On Oct. 10, Wall Street Journal staff reporter Ayla Albayrak was wrongly convicted of terrorism charges in Turkey.
