Editor of Student Newspaper Gets Backlash for Posting Story About Concern for Friends in Israel
“Unable to stand behind a dishonest and harmful representation of my story, I resigned.”
The shocking thing about this story, as the student notes, is that he is not at a school in a liberal city.
The College Fix reports:
Even red state colleges are folding to antisemitism. I experienced it firsthand.
In the weeks since the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, students and faculty at colleges across the U.S. have given way to the pressures of antisemitic, pro-Hamas voices, abandoning moral clarity and sound judgment.
While students at Ivy League and coastal schools have been among the most prominent examples, students in deeply red, southern states have joined in supporting terrorism and suppressing pro-Israel voices.
Just two weeks ago, I was the editor-in-chief of Middle Tennessee State University’s student newspaper, MTSU Sidelines. Animated by the horrific images I saw Oct. 7, I wrote a story profiling a MTSU student worried about his friends in Tel Aviv.
Sidelines received unprecedented feedback from students on the article’s Instagram post, and the student I profiled asked that I take down the article out of concern for his safety. I did.
But then the editorial board, against my expressed wishes, published a statement: “In retrospect, Sidelines failed to report on the casualties the Palestinian people have suffered and focused only on damage done to the Israeli population.”
Even though we published my profile story to the Sidelines website days before we posted it to Instagram, the editors and faculty advisor did not say I had “failed to report” on anything until the article had garnered more comments than I have ever seen on a Sidelines piece, nearly all of them from the “Free Palestine” crowd.
The editors who worked on the statement and our faculty advisor ignored my several protestations against its wording.
Unable to stand behind a dishonest and harmful representation of my story, I resigned.
And so I, a student in a public university journalism program in deep-red Tennessee, joined the company of student newspaper contributors like Sahar Tartak, who, in a Yale Daily News opinion piece, dared to speak the widely reported truth that Hamas terrorists had raped women and beheaded men during the Oct. 7 attack. The paper’s editorial board censored her with a “correction,” The Washington Free Beacon reported Oct.31.
The editors’ note read, “Oct. 25: This column has been edited to remove unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men.” The student newspaper later apologized for that.
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Comments
Middle Tennessee State is in Murfreesboro, in the Nashville metropolitan area. The question is, what is happening to Nashville? It seems to have turned into a big city with a liberal vibe. Even the country music scene is now full of plenty of liberals. There must be something in the city water …
Murfreesboro is roughly 30 miles from Nashville. It is a 30 minute nonstop drive from Nashville. That is NOT the Nashville metro area.
It’s in pretty much ALL city water.
What was country music, the music of Lynn Anderson, Charley Pride, Hank Jr. and others has been repulsively corrupted by what passes for “music” presently. The idea that the entire country music scene has been similarly corrupted is sad but not surprising. I’m glad I still have my Merle Haggard albums.
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My guess is that there are too many transplants from the Coasts, and like locusts everywhere, they leave behind a path of destruction