The Idea Men are Plotting…

Student newspaper shut down at E. Coweta

Published 10/12/07 in The Times-Herald

By W. WINSTON SKINNER
winston@newnan.com

Winston Skinner starts this article out with a compelling thesis:

“Smoke Signals, the award-winning East Coweta High School student newspaper, is on ice — the remaining copies of the last edition impounded in the principal’s office.”Without reading any more of the article, I started to wonder what the reason is for this paper on the ropes.  Could it be profuse language, anti-Semitic references, sexist remarks, or simply bad taste?

This is a list of problems that happened in the Sept. 25^th edition. (Directly pulled from article)

1.      Opinion column “…that satirically suggested the bottom 25 percent of fifth grade students on a standardized test be euthanized to remove “the bottom of every class.”

Go here to see his article and you can judge

http://times-herald.com/media/20071012_SmokeSignals2.pdf

2.      Criticism of a beauty contest “Judging who is the most beautiful in our school certainly does not contribute to our education,”

Her article.

http://times-herald.com/media/20071012_SmokeSignals1.pdf

3.      Use of profanity: “It was hell” in reference to a boot camp experience.  Also the word “bastardizing” which is NOT offensive according to “The Oxford American Desk Dictionary”

4.      A home coming shirt that Caitlyn Van Orden stating in reference to the newspaper “Maybe When I’m A Senior Citizen I’ll Get My Freedom of Speech. I thought I was born with it.”

I want to address each of these individually.  With the opinion column, it is just like Jonathan Swift with his “Modest Proposal”.  In his proposal, he talks about how children could have an alternate use…sell children of low poverty to high lords for cash.  The fatter the, better…yum yum!  The student who did his proposal parody, named Justin Jones is a genius in my mind.  I can see students getting offended to this based on their lack of knowledge of Jonathan Swift.  I think at that point, maybe it is time for those students to expand their horizon and read up on Swift.

Now on the terms of the beauty contest, this ridiculous and I agree with Van Orden.  She makes comment when in wonder to hurt feelings leading to low self-esteems and eating disorders, and a hierarchy in school now.  I think this is something that should be documented and published in a school paper.

“He (in reference to Principal Derek Pitts) said he wanted the newspaper to be a positive, uplifting publication,” Van Orden said. “He only wants things that show East Coweta High School in a positive light,” Mrs. Van Orden added.  Newspapers aren’t supposed to be chocked full of cutesy articles.  Newspapers deliver the news and news is like the truth, it sometimes hurts.

In terms of the “profanity” I consider neither of those words to be profane.  I can remember teachers in high school talking about people in history fathering bastard children and reading texts with the word hell.  With use of these non-profane words in the articles, I feel that it adds a more personal swing to the stories.  If we look at the context in which each is used.  “Hell” was used in terms of describing boots camp and “bastardizing” was satirically when talking about the values of life.  Neither are their to offend, they are strategically placed to illicit strong feeling

Lastly, this quote summaries everything that this article is about: “Maybe When I’m A Senior Citizen I’ll Get My Freedom of Speech. I thought I was born with it.”  I will say this much, I think that students do need to be selective on what they write about because there is a matter of can they do it tastefully or not.  Both the articles I read I thought were tasteful and are comparable to some of the articles that I have seen in the paper here at GVSU.

http://content.times-herald.com/356256997994953.bsp