Freedom of speech and censorship Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Freedom of speech and censorship - Research Paper Example gislature, prompting a lawsuit by the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State on behalf of Unitarian, Jewish and Christian clergy and the Hindu American Foundation† (Are, 2009) Currently, in the US, the operating system is a free press. This principle is very time-honored and is part of the Constitution of the United States. If a person does not make foundationally libelous or slanderous claims in his or her existing reportage, they have the freedom to express and say what they want. The questioning of foundational issues of freedom of speech under the Constitution is a serious matter. Civil claims can restore some of what the citizen loses to undue censorship which affects them adversely, limiting their freedoms. In the court case of Ohio school newspaper workers suing for a free press, issues of the First Amendment can be seen. One article sets a tone of judicial review and proposes that paying attention to the case presented will aid school administrators in easing tensions about freedom of speech in student newspapers. These administrators, on the one hand, are likely to be overseeing schools with civics and social studies classes that stress the importance of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (Norton, 2005). But on the other hand, they must look out for the whole of the school community and make sure that no one is using the school newspaper to violate the rights of their fellow students by being libelous, slanderous, or presenting explicit or offensive material to the individuals. In this case, a line between these duties has to be drawn somewhere—on the one hand, a paper that is highly censored and does not let students speak out freely in a reasonable way is not teaching them a very good lesson about the First Amendment; on the other hand, a newspaper that plays it fast and loose with censorship may wind up permitting one student to slander or do harm to the name of another, and face possible legal