Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has recently vetoed a bill that would have allowed high school journalists more freedom in their writing. This bill was supposed to stop the administration from censoring the pieces these young journalists wanted to write about and was something the students were really passionate about and were advocating for. State Senator Kimberly Yee also supported the passing of this bill, but Governor Ducey ultimately vetoed it because “moderation is key in a high school setting.”

While some restrictions in a high school setting may be necessary, many of the people writing are aspiring journalists themselves and should be able to have the freedom to grow, which is why this veto was overall a bad choice.

The growth of a journalist is something that cannot be achieved with censorship occurring. People reading the articles are looking for the truth to be told, not for it to be hidden because it was too raw or too real. They read the articles to know the real deal of what’s happening around them.

Whether it’s in a school paper or the local newspaper, people read the articles to get the facts of a certain occurrence. If the administration at a high school is censoring what information they can put in the article, then the people reading it aren’t getting all the facts they are looking to receive.

As high school students, people are generally mature enough to see that the people writing the articles are simply trying to put the information out there.

Modifying the media hurts it immensely. The first reason is one already mentioned--people aren’t getting all the facts. When you’re going to read something, you want to know the facts. Not half of it and the rest be sugarcoated or not included at all.

It’s important, as a journalist, to give all that you can give to your readers because that’s what will keep them engaged and have them continue to read the pieces put out. Journalists are so important to people because not everyone gets the inside scoop right as it happens, so they look to reporters to gain insight, form opinions or just to find out the latest news.

In a high school setting, it’s easy to say that everyone who picks up a copy of the school newspaper wants to know the latest news--if they didn’t want to know, they wouldn’t pick it up. So there’s no reason they should be neglected of all the facts in a piece because of censorship occurring.

Two years back, in Warrenton, Virginia, a high school senior at Fauquier High School struggled with her principal trying to censor an article she wrote.

SaraRose Martin heard about a new fad called “dabbing” because her peers were doing it. She decided to look a little more into it, and write an article about it for the school newspaper, "The Falconer."

This article was prohibited from being published by her principal, Clarence Burton III, because it was “too mature” for the readers.

Martin felt that this was unfair so she decided to bring her piece to an online platform, "Fauquier Now."

Within 10 days of being published, her story had 11,400 visitors and had reached well over the number of views the article would have received just by being in the school paper.

By her principal censoring her, she was able to reach out to a different platform to publish a piece and got a much better outcome by doing so.

This made it so that the people of her school, and many others, could learn all about the trend she was reporting on because that was their purpose in reading the article. Censoring the article by Burton taking parts out, or prohibiting the publishing in general, would have made it so the readers couldn’t get the information they were looking for.

Martin stuck to what she believed, and in turn, was able to reach a wide variety of people to prove censorship should not be an occurrence.

Another important case concerning high school journalism censorship lies within the Supreme Court case of Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier.

This was brought on because students in a Journalism II course, provided by the school, were responsible for writing pieces to publish and for running the school newspaper, "The Spectrum."

Two articles the teens wrote for the final edition of their school paper had to do with divorce and teen pregnancies.

In the divorce article, a young girl, whose name was changed for privacy, was interviewed to tell why she thought her actions led to the divorce.

The teen pregnancy article had students, again with changed names, who told their stories.

The principal thought that the stories were too inappropriate for a high school newspaper, and was afraid the students' names being changed was not enough to protect them.

The young journalists ultimately felt that they needed their case to be heard because they thought their first amendment rights were being taken away by the publication being prohibited.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri felt that they were wrong, and their first amendment rights were not being taken away. They felt that the principal had a right to prohibit publication of certain articles in a school run newspaper, as did the Supreme Court later on.

However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit felt that the rights were taken away from the students and that the principal should not be able to withhold stories from publication. Just one court siding with the students affirmed the argument that there are some reasons censorship shouldn’t be allowed, even at a high school level, which is a big step for young journalists.

Telling the truth is a very important part of a journalist's job. They are there to get information out to everyone else, and they should be able to do that freely without restrictions put against them. The truth is more important than censorship and, for the development of these young journalists, Governor Ducey made the wrong choice by vetoing a bill that would give them more freedom.