If you watch the news, own a smart phone, or read the paper you know that protests have been a common occurrences on college campuses around the country. These are due to a plethora of different causes but probably the most well known was the student protest that took place at the University of Missouri. On November 9th students and faculty gathered to protest the lack of action being taken against apparent racist acts from students on campus. The protest was well intended and had a just cause but due to mob mentality took a turn for the worst. As you can imagine at any sort of event like this, the media was on scene and documenting everything. If you really want your voice to be heard then it only makes sense that you want to be recorded. But needless to say one of the faculty members in the crowd wasn't having it. An assistant communication professor named Melissa Click decided she along with many others did not want to be filmed. One of the media members on site was a journalist for the student news paper named Mark Scheirbecker. He was filming the crowd when Professor Click approached him, pushed him, attempted to take his camera, and proceeded to insight other students to forcibly remove him from the square where they were protesting. This was documented in the
Atlantic news site.
Scheirbecker correctly claimed that as she is an employee of the state as she was violating his first amendment right to freedom of press. Not only that, now he is pushing to have her charged with assault. She has since been fired and an investigation has been opened into her alleged assault.
Her argument was that she was worried if media members like Scheirbecker filmed her protesting, she could lose her job. How ironic that it was because of this fear that she ended up crossing a line and losing her job anyway. It should be said though that if you believe in a cause strongly enough to abandon your responsibilities to go protest you should be willing to run the risk of losing your job. The other argument was the safety of the students as well as media members. These protests were sometimes as large as 5,000 or more members. If something were to happen and violence broke out both parties could be in danger. This is a fair argument but there must be a compromise in finding a balance in the safety of everyone and still not violating their freedom of press.
