Missourian’s conflict policy conflicts with free speech

Posted: 25th January 2012 by Adam Goldstein in College Censorship
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The blog J-School Buzz covers the Missouri School of Journalism. Recently, the blog’s then-editor, Kelly Cohen, was forced to resign from the Buzz because Cohen is also on the staff of the journalism school’s newspaper, the Missourian.

To understand what’s really wrong here, you have to understand a bit more about what the Missourian really is. It’s not a student newspaper. A student newspaper is one with student editors. Missouri has a real student newspaper, the Maneater.

The Missourian, on the other hand, has J-school faculty members as its editors. Missouri School of Journalism students contribute the content, which is then selected, arranged, and controlled by faculty editors. That’s not a student newspaper. That’s basically a professional newspaper, except all the reporters are underpaid. (Which is to say, basically a professional newspaper.)

But it’s not a professional newspaper, either. Not really. Because Missouri is a public school and the editors are public employees. And that poses First Amendment limitations on their ability to control the speech of students, particularly when that speech is outside the pages of the publication.

(As a side note, I’m aware that the Missourian is technically separately incorporated. We can have this discussion at greater length if you want to get into the nuances, but the short version is that the incorporation doesn’t remove it from its status as a public thing. The short version is that no governmental entity can do an end-run around the First Amendment by creating shell corporations run by public employees to engage in activities to the benefit of the public entity. Public employees making decisions to benefit a public entity are limited by the First Amendment, and the rubber mask of incorporation won’t fool anyone.)

Where were we? Right, a public university imposing limitations on free speech. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Missourian’s conflict policy was a legitimate, well-thought-out, not-totally-scummy conflicts policy. Let’s assume we think it’s a good idea.

Even if the policy was ethically valid, the First Amendment doesn’t let state employees impose rules that restrict student speech on the basis of ethics. The First Amendment doesn’t have a loophole that permits state employees to restrict speech if that’s how private employers would do it, or if it’s useful or expedient to the purposes of the state. Heck, if speech had to be ethical to be protected, most political primary debates would consist of a bunch of suits at podiums shrugging at each other.

If the Missourian can reconcile this policy with the First Amendment, I’m curious to learn how, and I’ll ask. In their defense, the Missourian started operations in 1908, and the incorporation of the First Amendment into the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t begin until 1925, so such a policy wouldn’t have been unconstitutional until, you know, the Charleston became a dance craze. That may feel like a long time in the city, but sometimes it takes a few years for news to travel.

But that’s almost not the point, because it’s hard to see how an organization edited by people who are full-time paid agents of the entity it most frequently covers, who also happens to be the biggest employer in town, could ever have a conflicts policy that isn’t a joke. I mean, how did the editorial meeting go when they created this policy at the Missourian? “Okay, now that everybody’s cashed their paycheck, NOW we’re going to be sticklers for journalism ethics.”

This is beyond merely having paid editors. Student editors have a First Amendment right to disagree with the institution. The faculty-editors of the Missourian may very well not, at least not on matters related to their employment. Which, of course, would probably include coverage of their employer.

And this isn’t even half of the questions I’ve got. If this is the biggest media owner in Columbia, isn’t this kind of monopolizing, anti-competitive behavior? If this rule is being used to gain a competitive advantage, isn’t that going to have some tax implications because this is more of an ancillary business than an educational activity? If these are really employees and not students, is it possible to get a J-school degree without taking these classes?

I’ll write more when I learn more.

TRANSPARENCY TUESDAY: What’s in your wallet? Maybe your college’s sticky fingers!

Posted: 24th January 2012 by Frank LoMonte in Public Records, Transparency Tuesday
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If you left college with a shelf full of Visa drink Koozies, Visa beach towels and Visa visors, there’s an excellent chance you also took a load of Visa credit-card debt with you.

A 2009 study found that the average U.S. undergraduate carried $3,173 in credit card debt, much of it blamed on rising college costs, which induced loan-strapped students to put textbooks and fees on plastic instead of writing a check.

Those debt statistics prompted Congress to enact the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, a consumer-protection statute with some nifty public disclosure requirements that college journalists should know about and take advantage of.

Under the CARD Act, issuers of credit cards must file an annual disclosure report with the Federal Reserve that includes copies of any “affinity” agreement between the issuer and any college. This includes private colleges, and it also includes the private affiliates of public colleges, including foundations, alumni associations and Greek houses — which means those organization can’t hide behind their “private” status to conceal their marketing deals.

The Fed has helpfully placed its collection of agreements online, both in searchable database form and in a spreadsheet. Each July, the agency compiles an annual report to Congress giving a snapshot of the state of college credit card agreements nationally, including which companies have the most college tie-ins and account-holders, and which college organizations have the most “affinity” card-holders. (Far-and-away the biggest as of July 2011? The Penn State Alumni Association, with 70,000 outstanding accounts, twice the next-highest number.)

Using CARD Act disclosures, journalists have been able to document some questionable practices that reward colleges based not just on how many students (or graduates) they are able to sign up, but how much debt those card-holders run up. It’s worth asking whether every price hike in tuition, books, rent and fees means a little unseen cha-ching for your university’s coffers.

Expulsion over raunchy tweets may cost high school football star his college dream

Posted: 23rd January 2012 by Nick Glunt in High School Censorship, Off-campus Student Internet Speech
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A student is once again facing punishment for speech outside of school — but this time it may cost a New Jersey private school student his future.

Yuri Wright, a senior football star, was expelled from Don Bosco Preparatory High School for explicit tweeting. He was ranked as the seventh best high school cornerback in the country and was No. 85 in the ranking for high school football nationally.

Schools including the University of Michigan, Rutgers and the University of Notre Dame were scouting Wright, and many had already given him offers.

Now, though, his athletic future is in question. Michigan has already revoked its offer, and other schools may do the same.

“It was pretty simple really, what he wrote were some graphic sex things,” Don Bosco coach Greg Toal told ESPN. “This is a Catholic school, things like that cannot happen. It was totally inappropriate.”

Since it’s a private school, there’s little Wright can do legally to get himself back into the school. Toal said Wright was warned several times to stop, but didn’t. He said the school “did what it had to do.”

Last week, the Supreme Court decided not to rule on the off-campus speech rights of public school students. Even so, Student Press Law Center attorney advocate Adam Goldstein said he’s confident Wright couldn’t have been expelled if he attended public school. His recruitability, though, probably would still have been damaged.

The tweets in question were racial and explicit. Though his Twitter account has since been deleted, some tweets can be found here. (Just be warned they’re pretty raunchy.)

Goldstein said he’s concerned about the fairness of the school’s decision.

“Is it every time a teenage male lusts after a woman, he’ll be expelled?” Goldstein said. “I really don’t know what (the school) expects.”

Iowa Supreme Court lets adviser’s ‘anti-Hazelwood’ victory stand

Posted: 23rd January 2012 by Brian Schraum in Advisers, High School Censorship, Student Free Press Legislation
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The Iowa Supreme Court on Thursday decided not to take up the case of a high school journalism adviser who was reprimanded over newspaper content. The move lets stand a November appeals court decision in the adviser’s favor which held that Iowa’s student free expression law provides broad protection for student journalists.

Former adviser Ben Lange sued the Allamakee Commmunity School District and principal Dan Diercks in 2010 after Lange received two reprimands over stories that appeared in the student newspaper at Waukon High School. Diercks objected to an April Fools’ edition of the Tribe-une and a story about student tobacco use, but Lange argued that the state’s student expression law prevented him from censoring the material.

A trial court sided with the school district, holding that the Iowa law provides no greater protection for student journalists than the Supreme Court’s Hazelwood decision, and that school officials can control content for any legitimate educational reason.

The appeals court rejected that view, however, and held that the Iowa law gives students expanded press freedom. It ruled that advisers cannot be disciplined for refusing to censor student publications protected under the law.

The state high court on Thursday denied a “petition for further review” from the school district. As a result, the Court of Appeals’ decision is final, and the school must remove the reprimands from Lange’s personnel file.

Superintendent Dave Herold had no comment Monday.

Lange still works for the district, though he no longer advises the newspaper. Lange’s attorney, Jay Hammond of the Iowa State Education Association, said the new assignment was not in retaliation for the lawsuit.

“We’re happy that the Supreme Court denied review because that allows the Court of Appeals’ decision to stand as law in this case,” Hammond said.

Thursday’s development should bring the lawsuit to an end. Lange did not seek any money damages from the school district, and each side will pay its own legal fees. Hammond said he will have Lange’s file checked to make sure the reprimands are removed.

The case represents the first test of Iowa’s “anti-Hazelwood” law, passed in 1989. Six other states have similar laws providing enhanced free press rights to high school journalists.

Onward and upward: A clinic on how to respond to an epic fact error

Posted: 23rd January 2012 by Frank LoMonte in College Student Media/Journalism, Student Media/Journalism - General News
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Page A-2 of today’s New York Times carries five corrections. Sunday’s had five, Saturday’s seven, and Friday’s had eight. I can recall seeing as many as 13; a few have attained legendary status. None, so far as I can tell, was made under pressure-cooker deadline conditions. They were just … mistakes. They happen.

This is not to excuse the blunder heard ’round the world fired off Saturday by Onward State, the student-produced news site at Penn State that prematurely declared legendary coach Joe Paterno dead ten hours before he, you know, died. Many terrabytes have already been spilt over What This Represents and The Dangers of Social Media. But news organizations have always, even pre-Twitter, tripped over their own shoestrings racing to be first. Just ask President Gore. Or President Dewey.

If there are any lessons from Saturday’s much-examined misjudgment, they’re not generalizations about how college journalists are sloppy or how online publishing makes people lazy or how social media magnifies the impact of mistakes. The better takeaways are:

  • Have a policy on anonymous sources and stick to it — especially when temptation is greatest not to. This is frankly an area in which the student media as a whole is far ahead of the profession. It’s rare to read a Washington Post political analysis without some White House aide or campaign operative trash-talking the opposition from behind the curtain of anonymity. Had Onward waited for on-the-record confirmation, the site might not have been first to the story. But it might have been right.
  • Attribute, attribute, attribute. CBS and the Huffington Post are, properly, being criticized for failing to credit Onward State for the scoop — and then eagerly attributing the mistake. Attribution does not absolve an error, but it enables the reader to make an independent credibility determination — “according to Onward State” carries less weight than “according to the Paterno family.”
  • When you screw up, own it. The swift and transparent way in which Onward State responded turned the inexcusable into the understandable. It’s apparent from the resignation mea culpa of managing editor Devon Edwards that Onward‘s staff made a genuine effort to verify its information before publishing, and simply was misled by what turned out to be unreliable sources. Again, it happens. The editors had no intent to embellish what appeared on its face to be believable information, and they obviously feel terrible. You can’t respond much more gracefully.

Supreme Court’s online speech no-decision counts as a “win” for student First Amendment rights

Posted: 18th January 2012 by Frank LoMonte in First Amendment, Off-campus Student Internet Speech, Social Networking Sites
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The announcement that the Supreme Court will not hear any case this term involving the First Amendment rights of students punished for off-campus speech on social networking sites left one thing firmly established: That the law is not firmly established.

That is not altogether a bad place to be.

Considering the alternative.

In 2007, the Supreme Court allowed itself to be swayed by sympathy for a put-upon high school principal in Juneau, Alaska, who made the ill-advised decision to snatch away a humorous banner that one of her students was waving at an off-campus event. To spare Principal Deborah Morse from having to pay money damages to a smart-aleck kid, the justices tore up the law of the First Amendment — and came up with Morse v. Frederick, an abomination of results-oriented judicial expediency over principle. The Court’s majority simply decided who should win — and then rewrote the Constitution to reach the desired result.

If the Court disliked Joseph Frederick and his “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner enough to fabricate an unprecedented new exception to the First Amendment, just imagine how warmly John Roberts & Company would have greeted Kara Kowalski.

Kowalski is the West Virginia high school senior who started a MySpace page with a mysterious name (“SASH”), which rapidly became a vehicle for hateful personal attacks on a particular classmate, full name and photo included. The kindest interpretation of the facts — by Kowalski’s own testimony — is that the group was meant to be known as “Students Against Sluts’ Herpes.”

Compared to that, “Bong Hits” is Shakespeare.

Kowalski’s case, Kowalski v. Berkeley County Schools, was one of three raising comparable First Amendment issues that the Court declined to accept. In that case, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously held that Kowalski’s speech was not constitutionally protected, because the distress inflicted on the targeted student was disruptive of school business.

In the others, J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District and Layshock v. Hermitage School District, the neighboring 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reached a different conclusion. The judges found that in neither case — both involving students who ridiculed their principals with crude jokes on phony MySpace profile pages — could the schools constitutionally punish the students’ off-campus speech.

The circuit court was almost evenly split on the legal rationale, but there was strong sentiment that off-campus speech cannot be legally equated with on-campus speech just because it is viewable anywhere.

That the Court has left lawyers, schools and students with no clear guidance — the same behavior that is constitutionally protected in Delaware today may be unprotected in Maryland — may understandably provoke frustration. But sometimes expedience is no virtue.

America is in the grips of media-hyped hysteria over “sexting,” “cyberbullying” and other acts of online stupidity, and yet little objective research confirms whether these phenomena are as widespread as the headlines — and the make-a-buck charlatans trying to sell “prevention courses” to schools — would suggest. Writing policy for a generation — or a century — requires a reliable evidentiary foundation that doesn’t yet exist.

The slate on which the courts are writing is moving — at warp speed. The social network on which Justin Layshock and Jill Snyder and Kara Kowalski created their handiwork, MySpace, was once an instantaneous platform for reaching a school-wide audience. Now, it barely exists. The notion that speech on a MySpace page could permanently damage a professional educator’s career seemed plausible when the Layshock case first went to court in 2006. Today, it’s inconceivable. Who’d see it?

Appeals courts — especially the Supreme Court — do not write individually personalized rulings. They paint with broad brush strokes, so as to give guidance for the many thousands of analogous cases that follow.

A ruling in favor of Justin Layshock’s principal would not say: “Schools may punish fake MySpace profiles in which students falsely claim that their principals ‘smoke big blunts’ and are ‘big steroid freaks.’”

More likely, it would say something like this: “Schools may punish off-campus speech that foreseeably will reach school and cause a disruptive impact.”

Now, change the facts of Justin Layshock’s case. Instead of going on MySpace to make fun of his principal, Justin is going on the 11 o’clock evening news to give an interview exposing that his principal helped change students’ answers on standardized tests.

What has Justin Layshock just done? In most people’s view, a public service.

In the principal’s view, he has engaged in “off-campus speech that foreseeably will reach school and cause a disruptive impact.” Speech that, if school administrator lobbyists get their way, will be viewed by the law not as a public service but as a punishable disciplinary offense.

In last term’s Snyder v. Phelps, the Court put aside its revulsion over the message of the speakers — members of a tiny Kansas religious sect who stage virulently anti-gay demonstrations outside the funerals of dead war heroes — and resoundingly reaffirmed that the First Amendment keeps the government from selectively protecting or punishing speakers based on distaste for their messages:

Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here— inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.

Is it “right” that Justin Layshock and Jill Snyder go unpunished by their schools? Maybe not. But it is important.

TRANSPARENCY TUESDAY: Is Big Brother watching you — from above? FOIA suit may reveal whether you’re on Candid Drone-Cam.

Posted: 17th January 2012 by Frank LoMonte in Public Records, Transparency Tuesday
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To the ever-growing list of technology-aided privacy anxieties (does Google Image Recognition really think I look like a publicity photo from “Planet of the Apes,” and did I have broccoli between my teeth when the ATM camera was on?), add this one: Are government drones videotaping my bald spot?

In a suit filed Jan. 10, the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that the U.S. Department of Transportation disclose documents that will shed light on the applications by both government and private entities for clearance to fly unmanned “drone” surveillance planes in U.S. airspace.

Any aircraft operator wishing to fly drone aircraft in federally regulated airspace (basically, anywhere above model-airplane elevation) must obtain a certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration, a division of the DOT. As of July 2010, the FAA reported having 14 active certificates for scientific researchers and another 247 for U.S. government agencies.

While it is known anecdotally that some U.S. agencies use drones for domestic surveillance, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the FAA has never disclosed who holds the certificates, or who has applied and been turned down.

The EFF’s suit provides a helpful reminder of the mechanics — and the shortcomings — of federal information disclosure law.

Most journalists have at least passing familiarity with state public-records laws, since they are the laws that apply to the agencies of local government (including schools and police departments) with which beginning reporters most often deal.

Fewer are acquainted with the workings of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). That’s understandable, since FOIA is notoriously inefficient — in EFF’s case, no responsive documents were produced for nine months and counting, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Nevertheless, a federal FOIA request occasionally becomes necessary — and if so, a few pointers and reminders are useful:

  • The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press maintains a nifty fill-in-the-blanks online form that can be a time-saver in creating a FOIA request, with all of the essential legal boilerplate already compiled. And considering how often the initial request is denied or ignored, the RCFP has helpfully created a standardized appeal letter and federal lawsuit as well.
  • Remember that Congress and the federal courts are not required to honor FOIA requests. The statute covers only agencies of the executive branch (though not the president and his innermost White House staff). That doesn’t mean that millions of pages of judicial and legislative records aren’t widely available — they are. Just don’t waste time sending a FOIA letter.
  • Under federal law, an agency normally has 20 days from receipt of a request to provide a response. That is the ideal, but it is not unheard of for responses to take weeks, months and occasionally years. Knowing how long to wait is really more art than science, and depends on both the difficulty of fulfilling the request and the backlog at the agency.
  • Most good-sized agencies have a “FOIA Public Liaison” who is supposed to understand the law and be accessible to answer questions and troubleshoot if a requester runs into difficulty. But if that office isn’t immediately helpful, a federal ombudsman agency, the Office of Government Information Systems (OGIS), was created in 2007 to help expedite compliance. OGIS staff attorneys can mediate access disputes if the initial request has gone unfulfilled. (As a side note, the online case logs that OGIS periodically releases are fascinating reading for freedom-of-information geeks — and at times may spark story ideas.)
  • Agencies get to set their own internal time-clocks for appeals — an appeal may be due as soon as 30 days from receipt of a denial — so if you receive a rejection letter, check immediately to make sure you don’t miss the deadline. But you needn’t wait for a formal “denial letter” to begin the appeal process. If months have gone by with no response, that is legally equivalent to a denial, and the requester can appeal or sue.
  • Date all of your correspondence with the agency and save copies. If it becomes necessary to sue, showing how much time went by without a response, and that you made diligent follow-up efforts, can be helpful in persuading a judge.

Remember that the shortest path between you and your records sometimes goes through a side door. The staff of a friendly member of Congress may be willing to make the request — and you’d be amazed how much faster a letter gets answered when the return address starts with “Senator.”

Consider, too, whether a more accessible agency might have copies of the records you want. For instance, statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Education may have been shared with your state’s DOE.

Finally, publicize the delay or obstruction. Widespread dissatisfaction with responsiveness to FOIA brought about a series of 2007 legislative reforms, including the creation of OGIS. Sometimes the refusal to produce records is the story. And sometimes that’s the story that federal policymakers most need to hear.

University of Missouri’s restrictive classroom recording policy raises constitutional flags

Posted: 15th January 2012 by Frank LoMonte in First Amendment, Invasion of Privacy, Newsgathering
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The University of Missouri, home to one of the nation’s highest-rated journalism schools, is now also home to one scary disciplinary rule threatening the rights of student journalists.

In a December 20 memo — funny how policies impacting students’ rights always seem to be enacted while students are away on holiday — Missouri’s interim president, Stephen J. Owens, issued an “executive order” making it a punishable offense to share recordings of class discussion with anyone other than a fellow student in the course:

To foster a safe environment for learning … the redistribution of audio or video recordings of statements or comments from the course to individuals who are not students in the course is prohibited without the express permission of the faculty member and of any students who are recorded.

“Unauthorized distribution” is a violation of university disciplinary rules, and may result in penalties against any culpable students, faculty members or staff.

According to an Associated Press article published in Inside Higher Ed, the university system revisited its policies after an April 2011 controversy that followed conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart’s dissemination of classroom footage. The video portrayed two professors – from the Kansas City and St. Louis campuses, respectively – as pro-union extremists.

The executive order is being received with some healthy skepticism. Mizzou journalism professor and open-government expert Charles Davis told the student-staffed community newspaper, The Columbia Missourian: “From a First Amendment standpoint, I’m troubled by the policy that tell students who pay tuition to attend that university that they can’t capture video from the classroom that you’re in as students.”

Missouri’s policy is of special concern for student journalists — of which MU has many — because it provides no exemption for a student journalist who redistributes a newsworthy piece of audio or video that is recorded by a third party.

Disciplining a student journalist who took no part in the recording, but merely broadcast a leaked recording, would be constitutionally suspect.

The Supreme Court decided in 2001 that a radio host could not be held liable for airing the newsworthy contents of a cellphone call that was illegally intercepted by someone unaffiliated with the radio station. In that case, Bartnicki v. Vopper, the Court recognized a distinction between regulating the interception of a cell phone call and regulating the sharing of the recording. The latter is “pure speech,” and restrictions on the content of speech rarely withstand constitutional challenge.

While 999 out of 1,000 class discussions will be non-newsworthy, that 1000th one might be very newsworthy. If a professor is using class time to engage in racist or anti-Semitic rants, there is no legitimate privacy interest outweighing the public’s right to know.

More benignly, it is commonplace for big-name business, literary or political figures to address college classes. Their remarks — including back-and-forth discussion with students — can be legitimately newsworthy. If a public figure makes a gaffe during an exchange with students, is the public interest served by suppressing that recording if even one student in the class refuses to consent to its release?

(And please, don’t get started on FERPA, the federal student privacy law. Pervasive FERPA hysteria aside, any suggestion that the statute precludes students from sharing what they see or hear in a college classroom is a non-starter. Since the only penalty for violating FERPA is withdrawal of federal education funding, FERPA regulates only the conduct of college officials, not students.)

Similarly, Missouri’s policy appears insufficiently protective of student whistle-blowers. Because Owens’ order did not define what it means to “distribute” a recording — the policy bans all distribution to non-class members, not just dissemination to the general public — a student could be found in violation of the ban if she plays a tape of her professor making racist remarks for a counselor, her parents, an attorney, or a reporter.

(Since Andrew Breitbart was not a student at the University of Missouri, he isn’t subject to campus discipline. If Owens’ order was meant to avert another Breitbart-type controversy, then it must mean that it is a punishable offense to share the video with even one outsider.)

While it seems inconceivable that a school would use the disciplinary process to punish or deter legitimate student complaints, experience sadly counsels otherwise. From Clark College in Oregon to Valdosta State University in Georgia to Catawba Valley Community College in North Carolina, college disciplinary sanctions have been regularly misapplied to students who simply opposed school policies or questioned school management practices.

While it is, of course, possible to manipulate classroom audio in harmful ways, students have had no difficulty accusing professors of making inappropriate remarks in class (real or exaggerated) without the aid of recordings. The existence of a recording should debunk more groundless harassment claims than it creates.

Beyond its constitutional infirmities, it is not clear that the executive order is necessary, since real-world civil remedies exist to redress the deceptive misuse of audio or video. Under Missouri law, a person who is injured by a false impression left by the selective editing of a classroom video would have a tort claim for “false light.”

That is the more appropriate remedy if Missouri is concerned about protecting faculty members against manipulation of their recorded words, because it punishes the manipulator – not the potentially innocent student who shares the footage unaware of how it will be edited.

The University of Missouri should haul in Executive Order #38 for reconsideration, and any new iteration of the rule should leave a safe space for journalists and whistleblowers to share classroom recordings without fear of reprisal.

Louisiana student settles lawsuit over insulting Facebook post

Posted: 11th January 2012 by Brian Schraum in High School Censorship, Off-campus Student Internet Speech
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A Louisiana high school student has dropped an off-campus free speech lawsuit against his school after officials agreed to expunge records of the discipline he received.

The unnamed student at Brusly High School in West Baton Rouge received a two-day, in-school suspension after administrators discovered a Facebook post in which he insulted a teacher. The student was also removed from the school’s Beta Club honor society.

The post read:

“[Teacher], no one likes you. Your [sic] more two faced than the average seventh grader. You cant [sic] teach worth a shit. You relate EVERYTHING to the Holocaust and WWII. Sure it was some bad stuff. But your [sic] an American Lit teacher. Not a history teacher. Maybe if you straightened up that back of yours and got your head out of your ass, you would realize that your [sic] a piece of shit and can burn in hell for all that you have done against the senior class. Not yours truly, The senior class of 2012.”

Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana notified a federal judge Dec. 19 that the case had been “resolved.”

“The parties both compromised a little bit and we settled for an expungement of the student’s disciplinary record,” said Justin Harrison, one of the student’s attorneys. “They removed all records of the suspension from school.”

The student was not reinstated in the honor society, Harrison said, and there was no financial settlement. The original lawsuit sought both.

Calls to West Baton Rouge Parish Schools Superintendent David Corona and school attorney Pam Dill were not returned by press time.

(For more information on the lawsuit, see our October News Flash.)

TRANSPARENCY TUESDAY: Can’t beat the SEC — on the football field or in the public records field

Posted: 10th January 2012 by Frank LoMonte in Public Records, Transparency Tuesday
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The SEC is once again the champion. And we’re not talking about Alabama’s Monday night BCS victory.

We’re talking about the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which — when it comes to archiving incredibly useful and revealing documents — may be the best friend a business reporter has.

If you are reporting on the activities of any private company, it’s essential to know your way around the federal regulatory agencies — and the courts — with which those businesses interact. Because even though freedom-of-information laws do not apply to private companies, they work just fine on the government agencies that are privy to those companies’ secrets.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better road map for business reporting than the work of Kent State University graduate student Doug Brown. Brown’s digging into publicly available documents for The Daily Kent Stater and its website, kentwired, revealed that the Ohio university came thisclose to naming its basketball court after a $1 million donor who’d been successfully sued by the SEC for involvement in securities fraud scheme.

According to the SEC — whose documents Brown helpfully linked as part of his coverage — Kent State benefactor Jason M. Cope was one of four co-defendants found liable for selling nonexistent shares of stock by a U.S. district court in August 2001. The defendants were ordered jointly to pay $19.4 million in restitution, interest and penalties.

As a result of the judgment, Cope was disqualified from working in the brokerage field by FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and in 2003 his brokerage licenses were suspended after he failed to appear for an interview with industry regulators, according to FINRA records that accompanied Brown’s report.

Apparently in response to the Kent Stater‘s digging, the university announced Jan. 6 that Cope was withdrawing his donation, and canceled a ceremony to unveil “Cope Court.”

The SEC and FINRA are separate entities with distinct roles, and it’s helpful to understand a bit about how they operate.

The SEC is a federal government agency, while FINRA is a nonprofit entity set up by the financial services industry (the National Association of Securities Dealers) to police itself, comparable to the way a state Bar Association polices the legal profession.

FINRA regulates the conduct of securities brokers and the firms that employ them, and it processes complaints by investors through panels of private arbitrators. The SEC enforces federal laws against securities fraud, and it can pursue civil remedies (by suing in federal court, as happened in the Cope case) or by working with the Justice Department to bring criminal charges (or sometimes both at once).

FINRA operates a website, BrokerCheck, that is a must-visit for anyone writing about a person in the securities field (or thinking about doing business with one). It will disclose, among other facts, where a broker is and has been employed, what licenses he holds, and whether his record contains any “events” — which include license suspensions or revocations.

The SEC website includes a searchable “Investment Adviser Public Disclosure” section with some of the same information that FINRA keeps — but that is just the beginning. Because in addition to regulating the financial services representatives who buy and sell stock, the SEC also regulates the companies that issue the stock — everyone from Microsoft to Wal-Mart to Starbucks.

The reports that these “publicly traded” companies must file with the SEC are exhaustive. And they are all available online through the Commission’s “EDGAR” database. Weeding out irrelevant search results takes some skill, and the reading can be tedious — but for a journalist, it can also be exceedingly rewarding.

In addition to yearly and quarterly filings that provide a snapshot of their finances and management, companies must also disclose any significant changes in their operations that might cause investors to run for the exit door. It was through SEC filings that Kent State reporters learned of Cope’s role in brokering investments for a New York-based medical device firm in 2003, a time when he was supposed to be banned from involvement in the securities industry.

The EDGAR database should be an early-and-often visit for anyone who is backgrounding a business executive, because a simple name search can reveal the boards on which the executive sits, the compensation received, any major legal or regulatory actions in which he is involved — and much more.

Reporters accustomed to the (relative) openness of public agencies may at first be frustrated at the opaqueness of private businesses — but with a little persistence, government databases can answer essential questions and lead to the discovery of game-changing news.

 

 

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