In a world of fake news and media censorship, journalists have an incredibly important responsibility of allowing people to have access to the truth. That is exactly what journalists for The Communicator, Spokane Falls Community College’s student newspaper, intended to do when they published a cover story about Darren Pitcher, who had resigned as SFCC’s president amid allegations of sexual assault and harassment.
Of course, some people don’t want to hear the truth— and apparently might even go to ridiculous lengths to prevent others from reading it.
Magdalena Clough, the Communicator’s editor in chief, told The Spokesman-Review that she placed 200 copies in the racks in the administration building, as usual, but by the time she checked back at the end of the day Monday, every copy was gone. She then said she refilled the racks with another 200 copies, which, again, were gone within 24 hours.
Whoa: The student newspaper at a community college in Spokane put out a story on a sex scandal in the college’s administration.
Then copies of the paper disappeared from campus – apparently stolen. Students re-stocked the racks and they went missing againhttps://t.co/AexqYIlApm
— Mike Rosenberg (@ByRosenberg) April 5, 2018
“We have no idea who is stealing these,” Clough told The Spokesman-Review. “I know there’s been a lot of controversy on campus about this.”
This prompted Jason Nix, The Communicator’s faculty advisor, to send out a campus-wide email: “As the faculty adviser, I will be working with campus security, attorneys from the Student Press Law Center and local law enforcement to discover who is responsible and ensure that they are punished for this infringement of students’ First Amendment rights. Censoring of student media through theft and vandalism on this campus is unethical, illegal and will not be tolerated under any circumstances.”
Nix told The Spokesman-Review that other colleagues said that the photo of Pitcher on the front page of the paper may have been a problem for the individuals accusing the former interim president of harassment, however the story reportedly didn’t have an details about those allegations.
“I find it hard to believe that this was a totally random act that just happened to hit that one building,” Nix said “My concern is that there’s someone on this campus – be it a student or a teacher or an administrator – who thinks it’s OK to go out there and try to silence student journalism. This is not just unethical. This is against the law. This is students’ First Amendment rights.”