No Room For Dissent in the Newsroom?

hroughout her first three years at a small liberal arts college on the East Coast, nothing mattered more to her than her work on the student newspaper. Already interested in writing, “Rachel” arrived on campus in the COVID fall of 2020, with students largely confined to their dormitories and all classes conducted online. Only after joining the newspaper staff was she able to meet a few other students and feel some connection to her new college community. In her sophomore year, with the campus coming back to life, she saw the newspaper as her “home base,” the place where she established her closest friendships and did her most meaningful work. In her junior year, she was named one of the editors. Two or three nights a week, the group would gather at the paper’s office to discuss and review stories together, share dinner and socialize until midnight or later. “I looked forward to those nights,” she says. “It was my favorite thing. I loved it so much.”

But in the fall of her senior year, the October 7 massacre and the subsequent campus protests shook up her college community, disturbing many Jewish students like herself. Rachel is not her real name, and she doesn’t want her college identified. Even in her previously cozy student newsroom, she felt increasingly out of place, distressed by the deep hostility to Israel evident in some of the news stories and op-eds the other editors were approving for publication and by a willingness to downplay Hamas terrorism.

Rebecca Massel being interviewed on Spectrum News NY1, September 2024. (Photo credit: Spectrum News NY 1)

“There wasn’t a lot of scrutiny,” she says. “I just didn’t feel they were thinking critically about our coverage.” As one of the senior editors, she argued in editorial meetings that by publishing so many articles that she saw as having a pro-Palestinian slant, the paper was making a political statement. As the weeks went by, however, it became increasingly awkward. “I felt the need to push back,” she says, “but I was uncomfortable doing it as the only Jewish person in the room.”

A private conversation with the editor-in-chief only made things worse. When Rachel shared her frustrations with the paper’s coverage, she was taken aback by the response she got. “You’re getting way too upset about this,” she remembers the editor saying. “I know this is really emotionally charged for you, but it shouldn’t be.” Rachel wasn’t sure what to make of the comment. Never before in her college experience had she felt that her Jewishness set her apart. She was not raised especially religious and had not bothered to join the Jewish sorority on campus, but in her senior year at the newspaper she found herself thinking that being Jewish limited what she felt comfortable sharing. “That scared me,” she says.

“I just didn’t feel they were thinking critically about our coverage. I felt the need to push back, but I was uncomfortable doing it as the only Jewish person in the room.”

She had considered the editor-in-chief a close friend, but that changed after she brushed aside Rachel’s arguments about the editing. “I felt I was raising what I thought were legitimate concerns,” she says, “and she was ignoring them. I felt like she no longer cared about my views as an editor. After that, it was hard to see her as the same kind of friend.” Rather than continue fighting an uphill battle, Rachel began holding back her comments on questionable articles. By the late winter of 2024, she was ready to quit. She stayed on but stopped attending the nighttime editorial and production meetings she had once found so enjoyable, participating remotely, if at all. “People were getting annoyed with me,” she says, “and I kind of felt weird hanging out with them in person.” By graduation time in the spring, she was ready to go. “I wanted to leave it all behind,” she says of the newsroom tension, “like it never happened.”

tudent responses to the events of October 7 and the subsequent war have roiled American campuses. Outrage over the attacks on Gaza—which left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead or injured, hospitals and schools destroyed, and about 75 percent of the civilian population displaced—elevated campus activism to a degree not seen since the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. With no way to influence the Israeli government directly, pro-Palestinian groups on college campuses instead erected protest encampments and demanded that their administrations shed investments in Israeli companies and sever ties with Israeli institutions. Some have even called for the termination of Hillel and Chabad campus chapters on the grounds that these groups are Zionist.

The unrest became one of the biggest domestic stories of the year, with the most detailed and immediate coverage of the movement coming from college newspapers. College newspapers have always been preoccupied with student activism, including Palestinian solidarity movements. The campus response following October 7, however, elevated that focus to an unprecedented degree.

Some student reporters embedded with the protesters and filed dramatic around-the-clock accounts of the action, even as police moved in to clear encampments. The intimacy of their reporting gave the student journalists a keen awareness of the passions driving the pro-Palestinian movement, and their coverage won praise from free-speech advocates. Caitlin Vogus, senior adviser at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, speaking in May 2024, said journalists at colleges and universities were “doing a fantastic job getting the news out and informing people, even in the face of very significant challenges and threats to their safety.”

Emily Samuels. (Photo credit: Grace Wilson)

A key part of the campus protest story was what the strident pro-Palestinian actions meant for Jewish students. A September 2024 report by the Jim Joseph Foundation found that one in four Jewish college students felt the need to hide their Jewish identity to fit in on campus, and more than half said Jewish students pay “a social penalty” for supporting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. A similar campus report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the highest-profile organization in the United States covering antisemitism and antisemitism on campus, found that anti-Israel incidents on U.S. campuses, including assault, vandalism and harassment, increased nearly fivefold in 2023-2024 over the previous school year. “As the year progressed,” the ADL reported, “Jewish students and Jewish groups on campus came under unrelenting scrutiny for any association, actual or perceived, with Israel or Zionism.”

Post-October 7, student-run news organizations were not always attentive to the growing concerns of Jewish students about rising campus antisemitism or threats to their safety, many observers say. At the University of Michigan, Salma Hamamy, the president of the pro-Palestinian Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), inflamed tensions in March 2024 with an Instagram post: “Until my last breath I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.” (She later deleted the post and said her statement was meant to be directed against “a racist settler colonial state upheld by a violent ideology known as Zionism.”) Around the same time, a SAFE Instagram post referred to pro-Israel counter-protesters at Michigan as “zios,” a term popularized by white supremacist David Duke and sometimes used as an antisemitic slur, according to the ADL.

At Cooper Union in New York, protesters banged on the windows and doors of the school library when they noticed a group of Jewish students studying inside. The students were able to leave only when police came to escort them out. At the University of Minnesota, a Jewish student reported that while she was walking to class near an encampment, a pro-Palestinian protester ripped off the Star of David necklace she was wearing, saying, “You’re killing my family.” Even Jewish students who didn’t experience confrontation personally felt the atmosphere shift. Josh Brown, president of Wolverine for Israel, a pro-Israel group at the University of Michigan, says Jewish students who have traveled to Israel are now hesitant to say so. “If people ask, ‘What did you do this summer?’ they’ll just say, ‘I was traveling.’”

Many Jewish students complained that stories about the demonstrations and their leaders were covered with an overly credulous lens. Joshua Nicholson, a reporter for the student-run Michigan Daily, profiled SAFE leader Hamamy in an April 2024 article without mentioning her “Death and worse” post. “The first thing I came to learn of Hamamy was her sweet tooth,” he wrote. “The second thing I came to learn of Hamamy was her complete and utter dedication to the cause of Palestinian liberation and U-M divestment.” At the time, the protest organizers at Michigan had declared their encampment off limits to outside journalists, and after speaking to Hamamy, Nicholson came away sympathetic to the protesters’ hostility toward media.

“The mistrust is understandable,” he wrote. Hamamy, he explained, “told me that Zionist journalists have caused trouble in the past.” Nicholson did not explain what he meant by “Zionist journalists” nor what trouble they had caused. His 3,000-word story, “Anatomy of an Encampment,” was largely a glowing account of the Michigan protest movement. Noting how the protesters were picking up trash, playing chess or doing their schoolwork on stone benches, Nicholson said the encampment “felt more like a standard campus event than an unruly anarchic revolution.”

Nicholson did not respond to a request for comment on his reporting.

Such stories angered Jewish student leaders at Michigan. “I thought it was awful, very biased,” says Ryan Silberfein, president of Michigan Hillel. Samantha Rich, the 2024-2025 coeditor-in-chief of the Michigan Daily, declined an interview about her paper’s coverage, saying her paper does not make “public comments about internal affairs or decision-making.” The student paper’s bylaws say the paper strives “to uphold impartiality, fairness and the complete truth” and “equitable coverage in our representation of all communities, identities and groups.” The university has around 5,000 Jewish undergraduates, the fifth-largest number of all U.S. public universities, according to Hillel. The ADL campus report nevertheless found that in the 2023-2024 school year, Michigan had the second-highest tally of anti-Israel or anti-Jewish incidents among all U.S. colleges and universities, trailing only Columbia University.

Molly Seghi (Photo credit: Courtesy of Molly Seghi)

It gave the school an “F” on its controversial Campus Antisemitism Report Card first released in April. The ADL has not been tabulating pro- and anti-Israel reporting and commentary at student newspapers, but Shira Goodman, the vice president for advocacy, says the organization has “an overall sense that there have been more anti-Israel and even Hamas apologist columns than pro-Israel. Sometimes we see something in a paper or a complaint on a message board. We hear it through our campus partners. [Anti-Israel] allegations would go unchallenged and there wouldn’t be an opposing position.” In such cases, she says, college papers may contribute to Jewish students’ traumatization. “We don’t want Jewish students to feel isolated from institutions that are supposed to represent the student voice,” she says.

ewish students who worked on their college papers were especially attuned to how their publications covered the Israel-Hamas war, the campus protests and the fears of Jewish students. When they saw evidence of bias, some—like Rachel—spoke to their editors. Some remained quiet, even as they sensed their newsrooms becoming less welcoming.

Molly Seghi, a sophomore journalism major, chose the University of Florida at Gainesville because she saw it as “a great school with an amazing Jewish community.” (Hillel says no other U.S. public university has more Jewish students.) She decided on journalism as her field of study after a gap year in Israel, where she worked as a writer at a nonprofit that served victims of terrorism.

Upon enrolling at Florida, she signed up to work on The Alligator, the school’s widely lauded student newspaper.

Seghi’s beat was arts and culture, but the attack on October 7 spurred her to seek a role in the crisis coverage. Her editors gave her permission to cover a candlelight vigil for victims of the Hamas attack, but to her frustration the closest she got to covering Israel-related events after that was being assigned to cover a Jewish film festival in Gainesville. Seghi, who grew up in a Modern Orthodox family in South Florida, says her editors knew she had strong feelings about Judaism and Israel, and she understood their reluctance to send her to cover either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel events, given that it was not her normal beat and that similar restrictions applied to other reporters. She was nevertheless displeased over which stories got the paper’s attention and which did not. In February 2024, she was upset by the way the paper handled a campus appearance by Charlotte Korchak, a frequent pro-Israel commentator. Korchak’s speech was disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters, and The Alligator’s story on the event focused narrowly on the disruption, with scant reference to Korchak’s message on the Israel-Hamas war. A speech by a Holocaust survivor on Holocaust Remembrance Day in May was not covered at all, again to Seghi’s dismay.

Rebecca Massel’s story prompted immediate and vicious backlash on social media, with many of the attacks focusing on her own Jewishness.

“I felt it was unequal,” she says. “Not only did they cover the protests and the demands a little too much, they failed to cover stuff that was newsworthy in the Jewish community.” Seghi says she shared that sentiment with the paper’s editor-in-chief but got little response. At one point, she considered leaving the paper but was talked out of it by her friends, including one who shared her view that The Alligator’s coverage was unbalanced. “She told me, ‘Be the change you want to see,’” Seghi says. “‘If you don’t represent the Jewish community within The Alligator, no one will.’”

Seghi nevertheless left the paper at the end of the school year.

Like Molly Seghi in Florida, Eytan Saenger was drawn to Binghamton University in New York because of its thriving Jewish population. More than a quarter of the students are Jewish, according to Hillel. Shabbat dinners at the campus Chabad house routinely attract 500-600 students. Saenger soon became a leader in Jewish student groups. Having a keen interest in public policy and writing, he joined the school newspaper, Pipe Dream, as a reporter and became a regular contributor. His strong support of Israel, however, eventually became an issue with regard to what stories he was assigned. “At the start of the semester, we’re supposed to fill out a form where we say what clubs we participate in,” he says, “so there’s no conflict of interest with our reporting. I had to put down all [my Jewish] affiliations, and whenever there was a protest rally or a pro-Israel rally, I understood I would not be allowed to cover it.”

Eytan Saenger. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Eytan Saenger)

Like Seghi, Saenger had strong opinions about the protests taking place and about how the Binghamton college paper covered them. News coverage of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, he says, was more sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian viewpoint than the pro-Israeli one. Saenger joined other Jewish students in complaining to the editors about what they regarded as biased or unfair content. It left him in an awkward position. “I was passionate about my work but had qualms about being associated with the paper and had to think about whether it was worth it to continue on the staff,” he says. In the end, he chose to remain at the paper but resigned himself to covering local politics and campus activities unrelated to the protest movement.

At Columbia University, the epicenter of Gaza-related campus protests, reporter Rebecca Massel tackled the issue of anti-Jewish sentiment head-on. In an October 2023 article for her student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator, Massel wrote about an Israeli student allegedly assaulted in broad daylight on the Columbia campus. Her story prompted immediate and vicious backlash on social media, with many of the attacks focusing on her own Jewishness. One called her “a racist freak.” Unnerved by the vitriol and mindful of what had happened to the Israeli student, Massel temporarily moved back home with her parents. But she did not back off her reporting. In the days that followed, Massel spoke with 54 Jewish students at Columbia about their experiences on campus, reporting that 34 told her they felt unsafe. Most did not want to be identified, and 13 said they had personally been harassed. “This was the first time that I felt unsafe and unwelcome at Columbia,” she wrote in a subsequent article for Rolling Stone magazine titled “Antisemitism Is Infecting My College Campus–And So Many Others.”

“I’ve landed on the philosophy that there shouldn’t be opinion sections in student newspapers, because this advocacy thing has taken hold so dramatically.”

Massel has nonetheless continued working at the Spectator and pursuing stories she considers important. One Saturday night, she reported on a demonstration where protesters began taunting Jews with chants of “Go back to Europe!” among other slurs. “I felt it was very important to cover that accurately,” she says, “because we had access and sourcing that nobody else had.” In such moments, Massel explains, she was determined to separate her identity as an observant Jew from her responsibility as a journalist. “I’m experiencing all that was happening, on campus and outside campus, as a student and also as a journalist. It’s like [being] a doctor. When they put on a white coat, then they’re a doctor [who treats whoever comes before them.]” Her job, she says, was simply to “report facts,” despite the attacks that inevitably followed.

he student press is changing in many of the same ways evident in the journalism world as a whole. Some college papers are now online only, with no print editions. Almost all include social media, with stories moving quickly, sometimes without any editor positioned between the reporter and the audience. Steve Roberts, a veteran New York Times journalist now teaching journalism and advising the student newspaper at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, tells his students that when he was a young journalist he had to deal with “crusty old editors” who kept him from filing a story before it was thoroughly checked. Student journalists these days, Roberts says, are apt to file “rolling blogs,” with minimal or no editing.

“Someone’s got a cell phone and presses a button. And what I say to my students over and over is, ‘There is no safety net. There is nothing between you and that button. There aren’t those old editors who saved my ass over and over. You have to adopt a code of ethics for yourself and be your own ethics officer.’”

There is also a drift in student journalism toward advocacy, again reflecting a general change in the journalism ecosphere. The surge in campus activism after October 7 brought changes in the editorial content at many college papers, with an increase in student opinion writing relative to straight news reporting. At her college paper, “Rachel,” the reporter who didn’t want to give her real name, says the space devoted to opinion columns got “a lot bigger” after October 7. “The number of columns that we published before was gauged on how many submissions we got,” she says.

“After that, we got such an influx of guest columns that the proportion [of opinion copy] increased. Because we were getting more, we were publishing more.”

Some journalism faculty and editorial advisers believe that many students are joining their school paper these days because they see it as a place to do political work rather than as a professional training ground. “We’re constantly having to turn people away who think they can come in and use us as a bully pulpit to spread their viewpoint,” says Charlie Weaver, executive director of The Minnesota Daily, the student newspaper of the University of Minnesota, and a former professional adviser to student newspapers in Iowa and Oregon. “This is a conversation that a lot of newsroom advisers are having on their listservs.” What Weaver has seen in the college press has soured him on the very idea of student opinion writing. “Our whole job here is, we give facts so people can make educated decisions,” he says. “I’ve kind of landed on the philosophy that there shouldn’t be opinion sections in student newspapers, because this advocacy thing has taken hold so dramatically.”

In the aftermath of October 7, college paper opinion pages were dominated by passionate arguments about the war in Gaza or university connections to Israel. In addition to publishing opinions, student editorial boards—generally made up of top editors and senior writers and elected by the staff members—often weighed in with their own strongly worded columns. After college administrations suspended some pro-Palestinian student organizations and asked police to dismantle their encampments, many college student editorial boards highlighted what they saw as heavy-handed tactics and infringements on free speech. Editors at The Spectrum, the University at Buffalo paper, characterized their administrators’ decision to call in the police as “inappropriate, unnecessary and unacceptable.” The Michigan Daily editorial board said they were proud of the pro-Palestinian encampment on their campus. “At their core, protests must disrupt systems of power to make a point and influence positive change,” the editors wrote. “The more the University clamps down on student voices, the louder and more impassioned they will become.” The editorial board at the Columbia Daily Spectator accused the university administration of ignoring “our countless pleas to engage meaningfully with students, opting instead to continue down a path of surveillance, oppression and authoritarian policies.”

There is nothing new about college paper editors raising arguments, but in this case more than others, the editorials involved issues about which student editors as well as staff had sharply diverging views. The Williams Record, the student-run newspaper at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has been in existence since 1887, but few years have brought as much internal discord as the last one. After a Williams student wrote an op-ed in October 2023 defending Israel’s attacks on Gaza, The Record came under fierce criticism from pro-Palestinian students, some of whom hung posters around campus showing the article defaced with red handprints. “We wanted to articulate that The Record has blood on their hands,” one student anonymously told the paper. A campus group, Students Against Genocide, later submitted an unsigned letter to the editor arguing, “You cannot commit to not picking sides or presenting ‘both’ sides when the idea of the two sides existing on a level playing field is a farce.”

Despite a policy of not publishing unsigned columns, The Record editor-in-chief approved the letter, a decision some other editors opposed. Internal dissension increased the following May after pro-Palestinian students established an encampment at Williams in solidarity with the Columbia protesters. A few days later, The Record editorial board joined the protesters in calling on Williams to divest any stock holdings of suppliers to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The decision was not unanimous, however, and several members of the board temporarily removed their names from the paper’s masthead in protest over the editorial. As was the case at several schools, no one at The Record on either side of the issue agreed to be quoted by name. Some students said they feared repercussions from being quoted on the record. At small schools in particular, students are likely to be familiar with one another, and many worry about the prospect of damaging personal relationships.

On the campus of a large public university across the country, Emily Samuels felt her student journalism experience upended after October 7. A longtime contributor to the Daily Bruin, the UCLA student newspaper, Samuels worked as an arts reporter and wrote regularly for the paper’s special “explanatory” section, which aims to contextualize key stories for UCLA students. She also served on the paper’s editorial board in 2021-2022 as a sophomore. After October 7, she felt compelled to write about her feelings as a Jewish student encountering aggressive pro-Palestinian protesters on campus. “The pitch was initially embraced,” she says, “but when I submitted it, from the comments and the edits, it became clear that my perspective of what was happening was not the same as that of my editors.” Her column was eventually published, but only after she pushed back hard against the editors.

Samuels grew even more uncomfortable after pro-Palestinian demonstrators erected a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in April 2024, setting up metal barricades and sheets of plywood to block access to campus buildings. UCLA students on their way to classrooms or libraries were stopped and asked whether they were Zionists, and Jewish students who acknowledged any support for Israel were harassed or had their passage blocked. “That was really dark,” says Samuels. “It was really difficult walking to my classes.” Three Jewish students sued the university, claiming the school’s willingness to tolerate the barricades amounted to discrimination. (In August, a federal judge issued ​​a temporary injunction barring the school from allowing the barricades if they impede Jewish student movements.) At the end of her senior year, Samuels wrote another opinion column for the Daily Bruin about her fear and frustration as a Jewish student at UCLA, including her experience with colleagues on the student paper. “As certain voices—many of which perpetuated hate towards Jewish people and Israel—were embraced, mine was questioned, and I was left feeling like an outsider,” she wrote.

The antagonism Samuels felt on the UCLA campus, and the apparent failure of her Daily Bruin colleagues to recognize her frustration, left her feeling alienated and anxious and colored her feelings about her school. “It was a really, really hard year for me,” she says, echoing a sentiment shared by Jewish student journalists at other schools. “There were a lot of days where I felt ashamed to be a student at UCLA. I felt very lonely, like nobody knew what I was going through.” She notes that most of her college friends were not Jewish. “They were absolutely amazing and always listened to me when I told them what was going on, but it was different just by nature of them not being Jewish,” she says. “I felt like a lot of the closest people in my life didn’t really understand why what was happening on campus was so painful for me. Although they understood it was wrong, they didn’t feel the same pain and hurt I was feeling.”

elative peace has returned to U.S. college campuses this fall. University administrations have tightened restrictions on campus gatherings. At many institutions, college presidents have significantly cut back on their public appearances in order to avoid disruptions. Regents have regularly rejected demands to move on divestment policies. The prolonged war in the Middle East and the inability of society to agree on the limits of free speech and protest, however, means the underlying rifts of the past year remain. Student-run news outlets are highlighting these shifting campus realities. After the University of Michigan regents refused to shed Israel-related investments, a pro-Palestinian group called “Shut It Down” took control of the student government, but more than 500 Michigan students, faculty and others gathered on the one-year anniversary of the October 7 massacre to show solidarity with the Jewish community. A review of the student paper’s stories on both developments showed the coverage to be straightforward.

It’s unclear what the long-term effects of the 2023-24 school year will have on student journalism, but it will stand out in student memories. Certainly, each Jewish student journalist I interviewed who felt marginalized in the year after October 7 was personally affected by the experience, although they reacted in different ways. Rachel, who graduated in the spring and is now leaning toward a career in law, says she feels “more connected with the Jewish side of myself. I always liked being Jewish, but it wasn’t like I felt it was the most important part of my identity.” She is following developments around the Gaza war with a more personal perspective. “The more everyone else totally demonizes Israel,” she says, “the more I feel defensive of it.” Similarly, Emily Samuels says the past year left her with “a newfound love and passion for being Jewish.” Having graduated from UCLA, she too is planning to go to law school, where she wants to concentrate on First Amendment issues. She says her experience pushing to have her columns published “taught me some important lessons about how to advocate for yourself when no one else will.”

Other students remain committed to journalism, at least in the short term, though perhaps with a new interest in advocacy. At the University of Florida, Molly Seghi went to work among more like-minded writers at Beyond the Borders, a pro-Israel student publication at her school. At Binghamton, Eytan Saenger spent the summer as an intern in the office of Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), a strongly pro-Israel member of Congress. He then returned to work another year on the Pipe Dream, though he says he is “not likely” to remain in journalism. At the Columbia Daily Spectator, Rebecca Massel is still fully invested in her reporting. As the 2024-2025 school year opened, she profiled six Jewish students who declined admission offers from Columbia because of antisemitism concerns. She is “considering” journalism as a career and now serves as deputy editor for the University News section of the paper. She’s relieved to report that not one of her stories has prompted a hateful response akin to what she experienced during the last school year.