There’s a life-size bronze statue of Ernie Pyle at the typewriter in front of Franklin Hall at Indiana University in Bloomington, where a high-stakes drama around freedom of the press is playing out this month. If you don’t know who Ernie Pyle is, well, welcome to the club: It’s been a minute since a journalist rose to the level of American folk hero.
Pyle was a reporter and war correspondent who got his start at the Indiana Daily Student, the campus newspaper at I.U., and went on to household-name status during World War II, writing dispatches about the common man on the front lines from Normandy to North Africa. He died in the Battle of Okinawa.
Today, a new group of students at I.U. is stepping into the shoes of journalistic heroes (on a much smaller, safer scale). It began last week when the university commanded The Daily Student, which is in its 158th year of publication, to stop printing news at all; only softer features in a Homecoming issue would be tolerated.
First Amendment advocates had a cow. According to the journal Inside Higher Ed, “The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called the decision ‘outrageous,’ while officials at the Student Press Law Center cast the move as a classic case of censorship.” An attorney from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, representing The Daily Student’s two young co-editors, said the university’s actions were unconstitutional.
The university’s administration is claiming the abrupt halt of 158 years of print newspapering is for budgetary reasons, as the Daily Student operates at a deficit of $300,000 annually. If that were the real reason, its editors fired back, why is the university issuing directives about what can and cannot be printed and restricting hard news? For context, this is a real daily newspaper, reporting on everything from the controversial removal of an academic dean to a visit by Tucker Carlson to campus to next year’s university budget. And, meanwhile, Mark Cuban of all people (the billionaire owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and an alumnus) has gotten into the brawl; he gave the university $250,000 last year to erase the paper’s deficit. “Not happy,” Mr. Cuban posted on social media after the shutdown. “Censorship isn’t the way.”
Here’s where the story gets even more cinematic.
Indiana University’s longtime rival on the football field is Purdue. Student journalists at Purdue’s own student newspaper, The Exponent, secretly launched what they called “Operation Clandestine Delivery” in solidarity — printing special editions of the Indiana University paper and delivering them to news boxes around Bloomington. “We Student Journalists Must Stand Together” was the huge front-page headline.
In this digital age, when the human voice itself is under threat from “A.I. slop,” it is quite amazing to watch as a new generation stands up to make newspapers and to defend freedom of the press. From here in Montauk, where the kids of The Ditch Weekly have made a splash, to Bloomington, they give us a spark of hope in dark and confusing times.