“(Ben) Affleck was being honored at the Beverly Hilton with the Champion of the American Way Foundation, a controversial liberal organization that promotes, among other things, free speech and freedom of the press.” – USA Today, Oct. 16 page 2D:

My, my.

Has it come to this?

A “controversial liberal organization” promoting such notions.

Here’s another quote for you.

“Freedom of the press belongs to the one who owns the press.” A former Maroon editor quoted that one to me recently.

He told me that when he worked on The Maroon in the 1980s, the Rev. James Carter, S.J., squelched a story that was already on the paper’s front page, ready to be shipped off to the printer.

The former editor said that in retrospect, it was a good lesson. If the students don’t learn it in school, they’ll go all crazy when they find insisted.

I’d heard that line before.

The Loyola Maroon is censored. It has been for as long as I can remember. It is usually done with a light touch. Only rarely has it suffered under a heavy hand, as it was in the story from the ’80s.

And as it was again in May, when former university president Bernard Knoth ordered that a story be removed from the front page of a Maroon issue that had already gone to press.

The editors hurriedly redesigned the front page, even though a run of 5000 had to be thrown out. In place of the banned story, they printed the First Amendment, large enough to take up half a page.

I was told later that had the students been out in the real world, they would have lost their jobs.

“They had a chance to learn a lesson, but it was not learned,” I was told.

Thank God, I say.

This issue is bigger than our campus newspaper.

Today, ten conglomerates own most of our media outlets.

“Some of the new owners find it bizarre that anyone would question the propriety of ordering their employee-journalists to produce news coverage designed to promote the owner’s corporation. Seeing their journalists as obedient workers on an assembly line has produced a growing incidence of news corporations demanding unethical acts,” said Ben Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly in a 1998 “Frontline” interview.

I asked my daughter, former journalist Katy Scott, who graduated from The University of Missouri, what she thought. She responded quickly and passionately.

“Yes, American journalism is now run by conglomerates that often stifle good journalism. But college newspapers don’t. I’ve been out of college for 18 months now and have worked full-time at two daily newspapers, both in major chains. I’m disgusted at some of the things that happen at these papers . . . I would never have realized just how compromised these chain newspapers are if I hadn’t experienced the idealistic form of journalism my college newspaper provided. We printed the truth, controversial or not, and faced the consequences. For the most part, those consequences fell heavily on the subjects of our stories and lightly on us student reporters and our adviser.

“When college professors censor a story for fear of the powerful, they teach their students that ‘this is the world we live in, so deal with it,’ and thus students believe there’s no way to change the problems within journalism. That’s the problem now – journalists think they can’t change the system, so they don’t bother trying. They become conglomerate drones. As journalists, it seems our only hope is idealistic young reporters, who know how a true newspaper SHOULD be run. Perhaps they will either change papers from the inside or create their own independent, award-winning newspapers.”

The First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of the Press.”

We may be doing it ourselves.

~Liz Scott Monaghan is a communications instructor and the “Maroon” adviser.