4.03 The Decision

In regards to Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, I am in agreement with the majority opinion. I support this side because there are certain instances when the First Amendment does not protect things. Just because it protects the right of free speech, it does not mean that you can go around saying whatever you want to people. In this specific case, the topics in the two stories that were withheld by the principal were on some topics that may have been sensitive/inappropriate to people that age. On top of that, there were a handful of students who were interviewed for the two stories that were violated. Even though it may not have been handled perfectly, Reynolds had good intentions in what he did. For the record, this newspaper was also school-sponsored.

I tended to favor a loose interpretation of the law for this case. Like I stated before, just because the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, that does not mean you can go around saying whatever you want to people. There needs to be some restrictions set in place to keep order, specifically in this case to avoid protentional chaos within the student body. Keep in mind that the audience of this newspaper are kids between the ages of 14 and 18. Since this newspaper is school-sponsored, they also do have the authority to alter it if something trying to be published is deemed inappropriate for the audience.

The two factors that came into play with my decision were the protection of the interviewees, and the topics of the two stories. In the case of the interviewees, they were told that their identities would be kept private when published. However, even though the appearing names were changed, the text in the stories still gave out hints to their real identities. For the topics of the stories, as I said before, these topics can be a bit sensitive/inappropriate for this specific audience. That is one of the main reasons as to why the principle scrapped the stories in the first place.