Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Illinois Student Newspaper Editors Suspended for Running the Danish Cartoons:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_02_12-2006_02_18.shtml#1140026472
[1]A Statement from the Publisher in the latest Daily Illini says:
A student task force has been formed by the Illini Media board of
directors and the company's publisher to investigate the internal
decision-making and communication surrounding the publishing of The
Daily Illini Opinions Page of Thursday, Feb. 9.
The student staff in The Daily Illini newsroom has questioned in
print and in meetings the manner in which Editor in Chief Acton
Gorton and Opinions Editor Chuck Prochaska produced the page. While
the task force convenes for approximately two weeks, these two
editors have been suspended, and Managing Editors Shira Weissman
and Jason Koch will serve together as interim editor in chief.
The board and publisher reaffirm that final decisions about content
in The Daily Illini rest with the editor in chief. But the board
and publisher also recognize that journalistic norms regarding
professional behavior dictate that it is the editor's obligation to
engage other student editors and student staff members in rigorous
discussion and debate of sensitive content.
Mary Cory
Publisher and General Manager
Illini Media Co.
The Daily Illini is an independent nonprofit in which the ultimate
decisionmaking authority is in the hands of the publisher and [2]an
eight-member board, which consists of four students and four faculty
members.
I'm pretty sure there's no constitutional problem here; the board of
directors of a nonprofit publication is entitled to ultimately control
what the publication publishes, and to control who gets to make the
daily decisions about such matters. That some of the board of
directors members are faculty at a public university doesn't change
the matter; I don't believe they're acting in their official capacity,
and, even if they were speaking for the university so that the
newspaper were a university-controlled organ, the university would
generally be [3]entitled to dictate what is published in the media
that it controls. (A public university is not entitled to dictate what
is published in privately owned student newspapers; but here either
the newspaper is private and controlled by a board of directors acting
in its private capacity, or [less likely] it would be seen as being
controlled by faculty members acting as public officials, in which
case it's no longer really quite private.)
Nonetheless, one can certainly question whether the board of directors
decision is sound. The cartoons are extremely newsworthy; to
understand the worldwide events of the last several weeks, people have
to be able to see the cartoons. They are indeed easily available
[4]online, but it certainly makes sense that a paper publication would
want to make them instantly available to its readers, rather than
providing a link that they hope their readers will eventually plug
into a browser.
The strongest defense I can see of the Board's decision is if indeed
the editor's decision violated traditional consultative norms of the
Daily Illini editorial process. If the Daily Illini had indeed
generally been run on a principle that, before any "sensitive content"
(e.g., potentially offensive criticism of Christianity, material that
some readers might find vulgar, and so on) is published, the editor
must "engage other student editors and student staff members in
rigorous discussion and debate" of the subject, then an editor's
departure from this norm might be seen as an undue arrogation of
decisionmaking authority. I don't think that there are any general
"journalistic norms" requiring such consultation -- a dictatorial
editorial model is perfectly within journalistic norms, it seems to me
(with some possible exceptions that are not applicable here). But if
there are such norms at the Daily Illini, the Board may reasonably
insist that the norms continue to be followed, to protect a
decisionmaking process that it finds valuable.
I'd love to know more about this procedural justification that the
Board is giving. Do any readers know more details on what actually
happened here, and what Daily Illini practice has been? Has the Board
made more detailed statements on the subject? Are the Illini's own
"journalistic standards" available somewhere? Here is what [5]one of
the suspended editors says (I quote from a Chicago Tribune article on
the controversy):
Acton Gorton, 25, said he believes he made a sound journalistic
decision in running six of the cartoons because the public has a
right to judge their content. He said he consulted with top staff
members and journalism instructors before making the decision to
publish them in Thursday's newspaper.
Here's the contrary view:
[O]n Monday, the paper ran an editorial apologizing for Gorton's
decision and called the move "a blatant abuse of power" by a
"renegade editor who firmly believes that his will is also the will
of the paper."
The task force will study whether Gorton made his decision in a
vacuum that was improper according to the Illini's journalistic
standards, written in 1947.
References
1.
http://www.dailyillini.com/media/paper736/news/2006/02/15/Opinions/Statement.From.The.Publisher-1614205.shtml?norewrite&sourcedomain=www.dailyillini.com
2. http://www.illinimedia.com/IMC/imedia.html
3.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=000&invol=96-779
4. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/volokh/posts/**
5.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-060214dailyillini,1,972803.story?coll=chi-news-hed
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