College newspaper editor forced out for holding the ‘wrong’ view. What’s the lesson?
We disagree completely with 20-year-old Maddison Farris on COVID-19 masks. But the ousting of this Oklahoma college newspaper editor from Wichita for writing about her anti-mask-mandate views is wrong, too.
Farris, until recently the editor in chief of the Oklahoma State University O’Colly newspaper, questioned OSU’s decision to let individual professors require masks in class in a Sept. 9 column. Farris had been told to leave a class for not wearing one. And since she was putting others at risk by not doing so, she did have to leave.
“Students at Oklahoma State need to wake up and realize they have a voice,” her column said. “They have the right to make their own decisions, to make their own choices, to decide for themselves what is best for them.” The problem, of course, is that by refusing to mask up, she’s deciding for her classmates what’s best for them.
After major backlash on social media, Farris says, half of the staff said they’d strike until she resigned. She did so reluctantly, she says, after several staffers did stop working on the paper.
“They couldn’t ever point to anything that I actually did wrong,” Farris says. “They just kept saying I violated journalistic integrity. But I kept saying, ‘Show me where,’ and they didn’t have anything. They couldn’t.”
She may have gotten her facts wrong, and if so, that’s a problem. In a Sept. 11 correction, the O’Colly staff disputed her interpretation of state law on masks. But she did not deserve the journalistic death penalty.
Her mother, Carrie Farris, says that “instead of letting this be, ‘Hey, let’s have discussions and talk about why we don’t agree with this,’ it was just, ‘Let’s remove the person we disagree with.’ There was no education in that moment at all. … This is much bigger than masks. This is violating her right to her opinion. We all have that right.”
The university had no say in the matter, but does seem to have sided against Farris, even denying that she was forced to resign.
“The proper lens is not what would happen in the newsroom of The Kansas City Star,” a spokesperson said. It should be, though. The O’Colly’s own website says its mission is to put “classroom learning and career goals into practice in a real-world setting.”
News outlets can’t ever run information they know to be false. And now that Americans can no longer agree on even the most basic facts, the pressure to run what’s just not true is enormous.
Still, Maddison Farris makes far better points about free speech and learning to talk through points of disagreement than she ever made about masks: “I want the people that were involved in this to understand why what they did was wrong,” she says. “I can’t rest easy knowing that this group of people now thinks that if they have a problem they can just get rid of it like that.”
This story was originally published September 30, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "College newspaper editor forced out for holding the ‘wrong’ view. What’s the lesson?."