The Indiana Daily Student and freedom of the press
Indiana University has no obligation to continue throwing money into a print edition that nobody reads. The world has moved on since the 1990’s.
When the Indiana Daily Student was set to publish a homecoming edition of the newspaper last month, the university told them to not print any stories other than homecoming-related news. The newspaper refused this demand, so the university pulled all funding for the print edition. This has people predictably upset about censorship.
Now, before I go further, let’s recognize the special pleading of some Leftists here. Back in 2001, before almost all students were born, the IDS ran an advertisement from David Horowitz. Leftists were “offended” and demanded the newspaper allow diversity offices to screen future paid advertisements before they were published. Leftists have a long history of demanding censorship of the college newspaper to protect people’s feelings, and the Leftists who have demanded censorship in the past have little credibility here.
The IDS has been losing money for a while, and the university helped clear the paper’s debt and subsidize it going forward as part of a plan to make the IDS financially stable. Print media is dying, and the primary audience for the IDS is reading on their phones or tablets. When the College Republicans started Hoosier Review way back in 1997, we knew print was prohibitively expensive, so we went online-only from day one. The IDS should have gone online-only fifteen years ago. Indiana University has no obligation to continue throwing money into a print edition that nobody reads. The world has moved on since the 1990’s.
Mark Cuban was unhappy about the cancellation of the print edition, pointing out he had donated money to keep it going. This is a lesson for donors to anything: If you want your donation to go to a specific project, then you should earmark that donation to that project. Better yet, donate directly to the IDS.
The administration would have a stronger case if they made a print edition themselves and contracted with the paper to print that as a homecoming edition, which would basically be a paid advertisement. What Indiana University may not do, however, is dictate the content of the student newspaper. Freedom of the press applies here, with the First Amendment’s protections applied to a state institution. While IU is free to end funding for the print edition, the university may well be in legal jeopardy from doing so as retaliation to resistance to attempts to censor content.
The problem is that the university’s clumsy way of doing this has damaged themselves and the justification for eliminating a print edition that should have been phased out during Barack Obama’s first term as President. They have also created a Streisand effect, dramatically increasing the visibility of Indiana Daily Student articles that very few people would have read had the administration not made unreasonable demands of student journalists. Hopefully the administration will learn from this public relations blunder, and the IDS can gain true editorial independence as a result.