As students, we’re often told the future is in our hands. As student journalists, we’re constantly reminded about the necessity of our emerging voices in holding truth to power.
But you might also have been told the integrity of our truth is dependent on its impartiality — that effective journalism operates on political agnosticism, and good writers keep their cards close to their chest. We are meant to serve as a barometer for the facts, leaving others to decide how to deal with the truth we uncover.
However, there’s more to news publications — especially student newspapers — than breaking headlines. Journalism depends on a symbiosis between context and meaning. Hard news reporting provides the essential facts, but opinion writing strengthens their significance.
Opinion columns, op-eds and editorials are essential to a publication’s trustworthiness. By intentionally distinguishing opinion and fact, the criteria for both become more defined, and the visible siloing of the two gives credibility to a newspaper’s integrity.
In establishing this distinction, publications also give credence to the experiences of their writers and their reader base.
Journalists aren’t just robots tasked with absolute neutrality — we are also affected by the truths we disseminate and therefore swayed by personal perspective.
The opinion section provides a platform not only for the spectrum of beliefs held by journalists, but the spectrum of experiences that influence our commitment to storytelling.
If we reduce journalism to just the dissemination of fact, we also dismiss an essential component of the importance of a free press. News publications are not dictators of reality — they are forums for dialogue.
Accessible news is essential to both increase awareness amongst a reader base and give that base a platform for their own voices. An opinion section — through op-eds in particular — bridges the gap, giving readers the opportunity to not only receive but also respond in their own voice. Rather than hierarchy, they create synergy between newspapers and the subjects of their coverage.
The opportunity for vocal dissent has always been important, but nowadays, it is absolutely essential. Student speech isn’t just being curtailed — it’s being actively persecuted, and opinion writing is some of the first to be targeted.
Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested March 25 by plainclothes officers from the Department of Homeland Security and detained for six weeks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana.
Her unconstitutional detention followed her co-authoring an op-ed in the Tufts Daily, published a year prior, that called for the university to divest from Israeli companies and war profiteers and to actively recognize the “Palestinian genocide.”
While Ozturk was released May 9 after a judge determined her First Amendment and due process rights were violated, her detention speaks to what Duke University student journalist Alice Qin called “the dramatic asymmetry in the risks and rewards of expression.”
In an opinion article for The Chronicle, Duke’s independent student publication, Qin illuminated the almost infinite accessibility the internet grants us is now overwhelmed by the increasing risks of persecution by a surveillance state that has demonstrated its uncompromising power.
As dissent becomes increasingly important, the systems for disseminating this dissent have become increasingly precarious, and the consequences for dissenting have become even more tangible. And as universities face threats from a presidential administration progressively hostile toward them, they must recognize student publications as means for student freedom in desperate need of protection.
The opinion section deserves recognition not only as a key component of journalistic credibility, but as an essential mechanism for dissent.
Opinion writing narrows the divide between the newspaper and its reader base. It supplements the context that hard news reporting provides with meaningful perspectives and invites a vulnerability that other parts of the discipline do not have the capacity for.
But when we face the facts, none of these things matter if universities — including administrations, faculty, other students and the like — fail to recognize and protect student speech through opinion writing. As a means of giving a voice to the university, institutions have an imperative need to protect student speech and to not cave to the threats of a punitive state.
Even when critical of institutional bodies, universities must protect student opinion writing — not in spite of their image but because of it.
This Editorial was written by Opinion Co-Editor Ada Sussman.
