Virginia Tech officials have threatened to pull the funding for the school's newspaper unless the paper stops accepting anonymous Web comments. The general manager of the Collegiate Times says her paper will sue if the school pulls it $70,000 in annual funding.
I support the paper, of course. Although I'm not a fan of anonymous posts, it's standard practice at professional papers. I don't think officials at Virginia Tech have the right to pull the funding over this. The purpose of a student newspaper is to teach students how to be professional journalists. I believe that campus papers should be held to the same high standards of ethics and fact checking that other papers must meet, and I also believe they should be allowed the same First Amendment rights as professional papers.
And look -- somebody agrees with me.
Although the Collegiate Times is independent, it still gets money from the school. That's pretty common. The Mirror, UNC's student paper, has a similar arrangement.
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