While the United States certainly has a problem with biased national media and outright left-wing propaganda, the problem doesn’t stop with the big networks. Unfortunately, the press, even at the local level, is often hopelessly biased and self-serving.
Agendas are being pushed no matter where you go, and a recent incident at a Utah high school highlights that sad reality.
As reported at the New York Post, a Utah school had a story about a teacher accused of being a pervert pulled from a high school newspaper, according to the aspiring journalists.
Rather than be silenced, they simply created their own website and published the story there, which is an action that the school censors should have foreseen.
Herriman High School reporters say their piece about Ryan White, a teacher accused of sending lascivious text messages to female students, was removed from their official website on Friday, not even 12 hours after it was posted.
“[The district] didn’t like our story, they didn’t like us putting the news out there and we weren’t shedding them in the most positive light,” student reporter Max Gordon told KUTV. “They just decided to shut us down.”
While the article was pulled from the school’s newspaper site, “The Telegraph,” other local news outlets picked up on the story.
The newspaper advisor, Alex Sousa, said it was Herriman High administrators, not the school district, that ordered him to yank the article after media outlets began running with the report.
“The students, in their tenacity, posted the story that they had written, and when the administration found that, they called me early in the morning and told me to delete that story and also to disable the site,” Sousa told the Deseret News.
A spokesperson for the Jordan School District said they support “thought-provoking, informative and accurate reporting” in a statement Monday but didn’t give a reason for their censorship.
“It is the responsibility of students, school advisers and administrators to have every story meet these expectations. Again, we encourage students to participate in responsible journalism, sharing informative stories as part of their educational experience,” the statement said.
The Unified Police Department confirmed it was currently investigating White for allegedly sending inappropriate texts to a 17-year-old last November and the district did confirm that he was terminated over the issue last year.
While it’s great that the kids were on the story, there is a potentially legitimate reason for the school to pull the story, such as the legal issues due to the ongoing investigation. However, if that’s the case, then the school should do a better job of communicating and explaining itself. Or else it not only risks its reputation and sends a very bad message to the students.
Source: New York Post