Our school newspaper is administrative-run. That means that students do not run it. Now before you tell me how there are only a few student-run school newspapers in the country, let me just say that doesn’t mean we should allow our administration to turn our newspaper into a rag.
Our ACLU group on campus is buying ad space which they will use to publish editorials because our student newspaper will not run them in our editorial section.
I sent a press release for an event I held on campus to combat media blackout on the Winter Soldier Investigation held from March 13th to March 16th. The plan was to show testimony on a screen, discuss what was said, and then discuss how we as students would respond in action to what was being said by these veterans. The newspaper did not even bother to open the attached press release and instead, they called our school’s student organization office and asked what we had planned to do for that night. The school wrote down Winter Soldier projection from 5-9 and so the paper took that to mean we were showing the Winter Soldier documentary from the 1970s from 5-9.
In order for the paper to cover a progressive issue on campus, we have to submit a resolution on that progressive issue in our student government. Since the student government is where conservative minds go to seek refuge on our liberal campus (and that’s because our administration will back them up), vetoes of these resolutions normally occur, which creates conflict that “journalists” working for the newspaper sensationalize in the same way that rag publications across America sensationalize conflicts between Obama and Hillary.
The school’s radio station transmits from University of Illinois-Chicago, which means students on campus cannot pick up the radio station without going online to listen to it. The station only plays music and does not offer any talk radio whatsoever.
As you can see, our school has some work to do in the fields of journalism and radio on campus. But more importantly (and this is an issue our ACLU group has just chosen to pick up), we are a group that will seek to acknowledge the simple fact that all media reform begins with taking action to preserve the Internet now before the corporations do any more damage to it than they have done already.
Eliot D. Cohen, Ph. D and Bruce W. Fraser sums up how important it is for this to be done in the wonderfully written book The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship.
Through forums where we invite speakers like Robert McChesney, John Nichols, Jeff Cohen, etc. and show video clips and documentaries on media, we will uncover how media is in dire need of reform.
A key component of the media reform group’s startup will be sending students to the Free Press’ National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis in June. We have an event planned for April to get students interested in that.
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