Our Voice

Next week marks an important week in the United States of America: Constitution Week.

As a newspaper, and more specifically as a student newspaper, the constitution is very important to us at The Colonnade.
Not only does the constitution guarantee every American the freedom of speech, among a multitude of other rights, it guarantees us, the press, the freedom to print the news without government censorship.

The media has often been referred to as the fourth estate, an independent form of checks and balances that has the ability to keep an eye on the government and report to the public information about their representatives.

Unfortunately, in today’s world the press has sometimes found itself limited in its ability to report the news.

In February 2007, a freelance news photographer was arrested in Miami, Fla. after taking pictures of police officers in public – a blatant constitutional violation and abuse of power by the officers.

In another incident, during the Republican Party National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., police arrested four journalists who were attempting to photograph an altercation that involved police officers and protesters after an anti-war march. At the conclusion of the march, a group describing themselves as anarchists erupted into a violent protest.

One of the journalists was an AP photographer. The other three were representatives of the University of Kentucky’s student newspaper, The Kentucky Kernel. Two were journalism students and the third was their photography adviser.

All four were simply trying to do their job and capture photos of the event.

Of course, we are lucky that in America these incidents are not the norm.

In many countries, the government controls the media. For example, in China they do not have freedom of the press. Instead, the country owns a monopoly on their media.
China even restricts foreign media correspondent’s access to information.

We take our rights very seriously in America. We should all take advantage of our freedoms, after all it is these freedoms that make us Americans. They are the foundation in which the greatest nation in the world has been built upon.

Our forefathers wrote the U.S. Constitution to protect the rights of American citizens 221 years ago. Today, the media strives to do its part to protect those rights, but when they are interfered with the public cannot be informed in the way that it needs and expects to be.

Now is not the time for the government, or any other entity, to limit our rights.

The Colonnade believes in the constitution and believes that it is our duty to inform you of what is going on in our campus community without “Big Brother” limiting our ability to do so as the constitution allows us.

Please join us and take part in Constitution Week, which officially runs Sept. 17 to 23.

This is our week to remind ourselves of the importance of our constitutional rights and remember that it is up to us as citizens to uphold and protect the rights our forefathers granted us.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 12 2008. Filed under Opinion, Our Voice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry