Last year I attended Colorado State University (CSU). Early in the year, an editor at our newspaper, David McSwane, wrote a controversial editorial titled "Taser this....F--k Bush". This title caused a lot of uproar in the community and many financial backers threatened to pull out and did so. The final estimate was that $30,000 worth of advertisements was pulled from the paper. McSwane, who was a very respected journalist on the campus, was ultimately fired after a hearing and publicly apologized for writing the editorial. The point to this story is to prove exactly how much power advertisers hold over journalists and what they write. Even though McSwane was technically protected under the First Amendment to freedom of speech when it came down to money or principle in this situation, ultimately money won.
The Collegian took the link to the actual article down due to the controversy, but you can see a picture of the paper here and see what CSU and McSwane had to say about it.
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I remember when this came out and caused quite the scandal. It's a great example of what we discussed in class.
ReplyDeleteJust out of curiosity -- as a student at CSU at the time, how did you see other students handling the situation? Were they in favor of the bold editorial statement or were they offended? And do you know how McSwane was viewed on campus after the article was published?
Many students actually signed a petition to let McSwane keep his job, but some Republican students were very offended. One girl even considered leaving CSU because she found the headline so offensive. Most people felt that McSwane shouldn't have been fired based on the First Amendment.
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