So, so, so, so listen up 'cause you can't say nothin'

                “Sabotage”, Beastie Boys, 1994

It’s just rained, as is often the case in mid-afternoon during a South Florida summer. The air is still damp, but not yet sticky as the sun begins to reheat Cypress Bay High School. If you’re not familiar, Cypress Bay is the home of The Circuit, the focus of MTV’s The Paper, a reality show about the lives of the staff members of what is arguably the best student newspaper in the country. With that in mind, it’s pretty intimidating speaking to the cast members of The Paper, knowing that they might just be judging every journalistic move I make.

Dan Surgan, a funny guy both on the show and in person, is my first interviewee. I’ve come to see what the cast thinks about their First Amendment freedoms, and so Dan seems like as good a place as any to start.

“Do young people appreciate their First Amendment freedoms?” I ask innocently.

“No,” replies Dan. “Especially in Weston, where I live, we have upper-middle class kids and they’re all extremely spoiled. They care more about their iPod than the fact that they can tell their mom to eff off…. Suck it.”

Well, if that doesn’t take the edge off!

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While The Paper often wasn’t about reporting or journalism, the season finale prominently featured some drama concerning the publication of The Circuit. In short, the Assistant Principal, while scanning the paper before it went to press, found some facts in a story with which she disagreed. Her verdict: Don’t publish the story!

While everything turns out in the end (the facts are corrected and the issue can go to press), it raised some questions in my mind: How do young people view the First Amendment? Censorship in high school newspapers always is always a hot button issue when it comes to free speech and free press; how do you young people feel about that and other sticky issues? Should school newspapers be allowed to print stories without the prior approval of the administration? “Definitely,” Adam Brock responded. Brock is the outgoing Advertising Manager for The Circuit. “[Newspapers] are allowed to publish what they want as long as it is not in any way bias or plagiarism or something like that. I remember reading a story in The New York Times about a high school newspaper that published a picture of a burning American flag on the front page. [Because of that,] their principal said they would not be publishing next year. And I think that’s complete BS.”

So what about burning the flag? “People should be allowed to burn the American flag,” Dan Surgan, former Circuit staff writer told me, almost wincing at my question. “This is a country where you can say, ‘I don’t like America,’ and that’s an American thing to do because we have the right to. Using the Amendments and our freedoms is the most American thing you can do, and even if it’s anti-America it’s still American. It’s confusing, but it’s true.” The landmark decision in Texas vs. Johnson in 1989 makes it legal for Americans to burn the flag as symbolic expression, but flag burning continues to be a hot issue. In 2006, the Senate needed just one more vote to pass a constitutional amendment that would allow Congress to ban flag burning.

But while flag desecration is one of the most visceral of First Amendment issues, others deal more clearly with the media. For example, after the Columbine shootings, multiple movie and video game companies were sued by the family of teacher Dave Sanders. Sanders’ family felt that those media companies should have known that their media “could have led student gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to carry out the massacre.” The court, however, did not agree, and dismissed the case. So, should, say, musicians be allowed to make music with offensive lyrics?  Yes, according to Cassia Laham, outgoing Entertainment Editor of The Circuit. “I believe you should be allowed to do and say whatever you want, even if it is offensive. You have the right to listen to [that music] or not.”

The questions I asked The Paper’s cast about free speech actually come from a study called The Future of the First Amendment. The study is conducted once every two years to measure the knowledge and beliefs young people have about their First Amendment freedoms. The study, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and conducted by University of Connecticut’s David Yalof and Ken Dautrich, found that a whopping 32% of young people think that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights that it guarantees as of 2007. 33% believe the press has too much freedom.

Gary Kebbel, Journalism Program Director at Knight Foundation, gave me some perspective on the study’s findings. “What has come out of [the study] has generally been that students think that First Amendment freedoms are important when they understand how they affect their lives directly. Many students don’t see a problem with the principal censoring articles in a high school newspaper. At the same time, they totally see a problem with any entity whatsoever censoring their ability to download music.

“These surveys also show that high school students are relatively conservative, particularly about their beliefs about the First Amendment, and particularly in an environment like we’ve had since 9/11 where what the government has been saying over and over and over again is the importance of security.” When I asked Alex Angert, former Managing Editor at The Circuit about censorship, if newspapers should be allowed to print stories without government approval, the conflict between free speech and security became apparent.

“I think news organizations should be allowed to report whatever they want,” Alex answered. If the government during Watergate got to cover up what was going on, how would the public know?” But I pressed him, asking, “What if a science journal printed the blueprints for an atomic bomb?” Maybe that was a little bit of a harsh question, but it got your attention, right?

“I think in certain situations, [censoring] something like that is okay,” Alex said.” But for the most part, it’s the media’s job to expose and tell what’s going on in the world.”

But our current administration is doing a good job of setting the agenda of what gets reported, according to Kebbel, at least when it comes to security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The government has exercised a much more stringent, a much more thought out, and depending on your point of view, much better system of control,” Kebbel said, comparing the Vietnam era to the present. “The government now is doing a better job of setting the agenda and saying that the agenda should be security.

“The thing about the First Amendment is that it is often in conflict with other Amendments. Can you shout, ‘Fire’, in a crowded theater? No. So there’s always this tension between [security and free speech]. The government has been able to exploit that balance, I would say, more in favor of security.”

Just goes to show that having freedom is not the only important factor in being free. It’s how we think about those freedoms that makes the difference, whether it be freedom of speech or freedom from attack.

The next Future of the First Amendment survey will be conducted during spring 2009, with results to be released next fall.

 Special thanks to Michael Montali for his help with this week's blog!