As Trump targets campus protesters, student newspapers wrestle with coverage

“I’ve been working here for over three decades, and these are times we have never seen before,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center. “We’ve crossed a line with the situation at Tufts.”

Situated at the intersection of the Trump administration’s targeting of higher education, immigration, and First Amendment rights, student journalists are having to question the very basics of news gathering: Should they omit the names of some students who express pro-Palestinian views, obscure faces of protesters in pictures, or otherwise self-censor information that could be used to attack and detain their classmates and professors?

The arrest at Tufts is particularly significant for student media given that Öztürk wasn’t known for her campus activism beyond coauthoring the opinion piece a year ago. In that article she and three other students criticized the university’s response to the pro-Palestinian movement and called on Tufts to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security previously said she “engaged in support of Hamas” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the revocation of her visa and her detention, suggesting she contributed to disruptions on college campuses. But authorities have not cited evidence to back up those claims, and Öztürk’s defense team has argued she was detained over the op-ed.

“Criticizing US foreign policy and human rights violations is neither illegal nor grounds for detention,” said Öztürk’s attorney, Mahsa Khanbabai, in a statement earlier this week. “The government must immediately release Rümeysa to continue her studies and rejoin her community.”

The threats students face are more pronounced than in previous eras of protest because of the internet. The names of students and faculty with pro-Palestinian views are readily available from websites such as Canary Mission, which compiles profiles of campus protesters and people like Öztürk who wrote op-eds or appeared in student news articles.

That could put student news outlets in an impossible position — where even when they report responsibly or follow the standard ethics in publishing op-eds, their work can be used as a tool to hunt down and punish their peers.

Hiestand said the Student Press Law Center has seen a 39 percent jump in requests from student media for legal and reporting advice compared to a year ago. His organization is advising student news outlets not to share anonymous sources with advisers or school officials, keep confidential information off school emails, and revisit policies on when to remove certain information.

He added that while journalists know they are sacrificing a degree of accuracy by using anonymous sources, that could be the only way to tell the story of what’s happening while protecting sources, because the stakes are so high.

“I think that we need to really rethink what’s up on our pages right now, and what we’re going to put up on our pages in the future,” Hiestand said.

Now, with the stark threats against students like Öztürk, student media outlets are increasingly using unnamed sources or removing names of students from stories to protect sources who might risk more than just public criticism for speaking out. That is particularly true at Boston-area universities with a high concentration of international students.

“For now, the anonymous policy has definitely loosened,” said Brendan Galvin, editor-in-chief of the Daily Free Press at Boston University. One example is by using only the first names or nicknames of students who decline to share their last names, such as in a story about a student walkout organized by the Boston University Students for Justice in Palestine, Galvin said.

The student newspaper at Northeastern University, the Huntington News, has also been more lenient with granting anonymity to sources in news articles, but not so with op-eds, said Sonel Cutler, the paper’s editor-in-chief. Photographers have also been trying not to take close-up photos of protesters at rallies, Cutler added, especially following the arrest of Öztürk. (Cutler is a former Globe co-op student.)

Additionally, the Huntington News has tried to be more specific in describing to readers why some sources won’t be named.

“Last year we did a lot of ‘fear of retaliation.’ This year we’ve tried to start doing more of ‘fear of retaliation,’ of what?” Cutler said. “Do they actually face any retaliation for saying the content of the quote?”

Caroline Hendrie, executive director of the Society of Professional Journalists, said all news organizations should consider such practices in the current environment.

“The idea of minimizing harm — right at the heart of that is balancing the public’s need for information against the potential harm that can come from reporting,” Hendrie said.

Even with an added layer of caution, some student outlets are using the moment to reaffirm their commitments to covering political speech on campus. The Huntington News even relaunched a version of its editorial board that had been dormant since 2019 to speak out as an institution at this moment. Its first editorial was titled, “Our First Amendment rights are under assault.”

“This is the time to speak up,” said Rachana Madhav, the publication’s opinion editor. “With the formation of the editorial board, we’ve been really trying to push that.”

The editors at Tufts Daily, where Öztürk’s op-ed was published, declined interview requests from the Globe.

But in a letter published on March 28, the school paper’s managing board wrote that Öztürk was exercising a fundamental American right and its regular publication of op-eds is crucial to fostering dialogue on campus.

“The Daily has the ability to conduct its work because of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment — rights that not only allow us to publish freely, but also encourage participation in debate, the expression of ideas and the pursuit of truth,” the student journalists wrote. “It is our core belief that journalism is one of the critical tenets that upholds our democracy.”

The Tufts editors also reaffirmed that protecting its staff and sources is top of mind, while assuring they will continue to share a diverse array of viewpoints.

“[T]he withholding of ideas and abstinence from debate will only contribute to the erosion of free expression,” they wrote.

Antero Mejr, a first-year computer science PhD student at Tufts who wrote an op-ed this week calling on Tufts to help protect students from detentions, said in an interview that student publications should not back down from serving as venues for speech that counters the views of those in power.

“I think the actions of ICE actually show that people do care about these student publications. They’re important,” he said. “And that’s even more reason to keep on it.”

Some student outlets, however, are trying to minimize exposure out of fear they could harm people on their campuses. At least one student paper declined an interview request from the Globe out of fear that it could put their staff at risk.

Those are valid fears, Hiestand said, who added it’s hard for student journalists to tell schoolmates to speak out at this precarious moment, particularly for international students. But he also said it’s the job of journalists to speak up, and student media is critical to understanding what’s happening on college campuses.

“We rely upon them for a lot of the reporting that just professional media is not able to do anymore,” he said.

Updated: The Student Press Law Center clarified that calls for legal and reporting advice are up 39 percent compared to last year, a more specific figure than originally provided.

Aidan Ryan can be reached at aidan.ryan@globe.com. Follow him @aidanfitzryan.