Red, Black and Dead

"We also assert our continued confidence
in Publisher Harry Montevideo and
the professional staff he has assembled.
We added to that staff recently to
improve the learning experience
we offer our student journalists." -The
Editorial staff of The Red & Black

Earlier this week, a memo by one of the board of directors for the University of Georgia's ostensibly-independent student newspaper The Red & Black was leaked, and it was incredibly damning.

The memo showed a total lack of understanding of the way journalism and education are supposed to work, and a disregard for the truth in service of coddling the school administration and advertisers. The student editorial staff of the newspaper, dismayed by the statement that was to be aimed at them, walked out en masse.

Over the past week, they've fought against the school's well-paid puppets, who have intentionally distorted and misrepresented the situation and, in one case, actually physically assaulted a reporter who was covering the story for the college's other newspaper.

There have also been at least two resignations on the part of board members--one who wrote the memo that led to a media firestorm and one who left today when he felt his fellow board members weren't standing strong enough in their opposition to the student journalists.

And along the way, it reminded me of my college newspaper and the way that things were run there. It was strikingly similar, except that nobody ever stood up to it. The Oswegonian is a nominally independent newspaper, but it exists to serve the school, not the students or the Oswego community. I was incredibly proud of the "Red & Dead" crew, the young reporters who left the comfort of their prestigious school paper and struck out on their own in the name of truth, openness and the principles of journalism that are too often shunted aside for convenience's sake in today's media, both student and professional.

And today, they issued a statement declaring victory. It may have been an actual victory, and it almost certainly seemed like it to them, but the neutered, corporate-friendly statement they had to rubber-stamp after interviewing to get the jobs back they'd walked out on because their boss--who will, incidentally, remain their boss and makes more money in a year than I owe in student loans--had no idea what the hell he was doing really just withered any optimism I had that these young writers represented some bright future for journalism.

Instead, what I see is a group of kids who got their hands on an eye-only document they weren't supposed to have, who splashed it up on the Internet to get some quick attention and who went back with their tails between their legs when the school's tools threatened to take away their resume-padding editorial positions.

I had hoped that this group of young students would be indicative of some kind of movement that spoke to the future of journalism in our country. Unfortunately, it looks like I was right.