Well, not really, but that’s what the hysterical right will tell you. Here’s the situation: Conservative columnist at UNC writes a piece on racial profiling. In her piece, she uses quotes from three students who she interviewed under the premise of writing a paper on Arab-American relations. They didn’t know that their quotes were going to be used in the newspaper, and they certainly didn’t realize that they were going to be used as evidence in support of her opinion. The editors at the paper liked the column, they told her it was good, and they ran it. After its publication, they learned how she got the quotes. They learned that she put the quotes in her column out of context. They learned that she strung together quotes to say something that the speaker hadn’t intended. And so the opinion editor fired her for breach of journalistic ethics (read his whole column. It’s good).
Now somehow, this all adds up to a violation of the columnist’s First Amendment rights. How, I’m still not entirely sure. She can use her First Amendment right of free speech as long as she wants; the right of freedom of the press is pretty in tact here too, isn’t it? They didn’t spike her column for its offensive content (and its content is pretty friggin offensive). They stood behind its publication. If this was about her ideas, those ideas wouldn’t have been printed in the first place. This is about misleading sources, taking their words out of context and quoting them innacurately. It’s ethically questionable, and breeds distrust between the student body and the paper that is supposed to represent and cater to them. If I had been her editor, I would have probably fired her, too — or at least given her a pretty strong talking-to and put her on probation (Shankar, opinion editor extraordinaire, what would you have done?). This isn’t about the First Amendment, and Mary Katherine Ham should study her Constitution before she goes around slinging those accusations.