First amendment needs protection

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a story on www.cnn.com citing a study of high school students ' beliefs concerning the relevance of the First Amendment. Given all of the recent issues regarding free speech with things like blogging, I was very surprised to see that over one-third of high school students polled stated that the First Amendment guaranteed too many freedoms.

I just couldn ' t believe it. Here I am, not three or four years older than most of the students polled just hoping that those three or four years make enough difference to these students to help them realize that the First Amendment isn ' t " no big deal, " as the subheading of the CNN article suggested.

Even more frightening to me as a journalist is that half of the students polled believed that the government should have to approve news stories before they are published. The freedom of the press to publish without prior restraint is one of the fundamental facets of the First Amendment. The executive director of the Journalism Education Association, Linda Putney, offers a reasonable explanation. She is quoted in the article as saying, " Schools don ' t do enough to teach the First Amendment. Students don ' t know the rights it protects. "

Ignorance, however, is never an excuse. In a time where people are becoming more and more apathetic towards all things political, legislation can be passed and policies can be made right under our noses without our knowledge. While much of that legislation may not affect us directly, it often slowly chisels away our rights.

As more and more of these students reach voting age, their apathetic, or at best misinformed, views will adversely affect our political system. Sure, many of them won ' t vote and won ' t have a direct impact on who is elected or which referenda and initiatives are passed, but even this can hardly be viewed as a good thing.

In an annual report on American journalism, it was found that the average age of someone who regularly watches cable news is almost 57. The average age for network news is even higher: 60. It means that people our age, the ones who are supposed to be able to affect the most change, are probably not watching the news.

Whether or not this is a bad thing, however, is a bit ambiguous. Television news has become notorious for sensationalism and not telling the whole story, so the fact that younger audiences aren ' t watching it as much could be interpreted as a good thing if they ' re getting their news from someplace else, like magazines, newspapers or the internet. However, the study suggests that people our age, on the whole, aren ' t getting their news from anywhere.

So what can be done about it? I wish I had an answer. Of course, there are tons of suggestions from just about everyone, but which of those suggestions might lead to real results? Could more vigorous civics and government curriculum in schools help remedy the ignorance of and apathy toward the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights as a whole? Could the integration of news media in the classroom condition students to read the news in the future and make them want to know what ' s going on in the world? It ' s hard to tell.

It can be inferred from the study cited in the CNN article that students who take part in media activities such as newspaper and TV production are less likely to be apathetic and more likely to be informed. About 90 percent of principals of the schools included in the study said that learning some journalism skills is important for students, but lack of funding has resulted in a large number of schools eliminating student media opportunities.

There are so many other possibilities that it boggles the mind. Students in many schools are unable to fully practice their basic freedoms on a daily basis. How are they supposed to understand them if they can ' t use them?

What it all boils down to is that at some point in time, something went very wrong with the way young people understand the political process and become involved in it. It ' s becoming less and less common these days to hear about student activism. Fight the trend. Scan through the headline stories on your browser ' s start page, watch the evening news, tune into a cable news channel for half an hour or skim through a major newspaper. (The Technique is a good start, but you might want to think a little bigger.)

At the very least, become addicted to The Daily Show. It ' s funny, a little informative and a good place to start if you ' re really not into the news. In no time you ' ll be wanting to know more and before you know it, you ' ll be a regular news junkie.