Joey knows just how you feel, Kenny. Except that he, unlike you, isn't real.
Eighteen-year-old Kenneth “Kenny” Clements, a graduate of Miami’s Ronald W. Reagan/Doral Senior High School, has filed suit against the school district because in February of 2011, when he was a senior, the Reagan Advocate published a story entitled “Teens Stay Quiet About STD’s”. The school paper’s front page story featured a photograph of Kenny with an “x” over his mouth, signifying that he was hiding his disease.
But Kenny didn’t have any sexually transmitted diseases, and he didn’t give his permission to have his photo used to suggest he did. After the article appeared, he says, his fellow students called him “STD Boy.”
This was obviously a cruel, unfair and irresponsible act by the students running the paper, but look at how irresponsibly professional journalists behave when they are drunk with the power of the press. This is why school newspapers must have diligent and competent supervision by adults, to prevent these kinds of things from happening….as they inevitably will without a cool head and an experienced hand at the rudder.
And where was that supervision on the Reagan Advocate? Good question! I don’t know. The adult in charge of overseeing the newspaper and yearbook is a woman named Lourdes Montiel. She was apparently playing hooky the day the story was being readied for publication. The principal, Jacques Bentolila, also reviewed the newspaper before it was published, according to the lawsuit. If so, the two responsible professionals failed the students, failed their duties, and failed the school. Obviously, they failed Kenny, a.k.a. STD Boy.
A newspaper, even a school newspaper, has extraordinary power to do good, and also to do reckless harm. Leaving students to their own judgment in the publication of a newspaper is only slightly less irresponsible than allowing a student driver to operate a motor vehicle without adult supervision, or to hand a teen a rifle and tell him to go shoot something. Montiel and Bentolila, not the students, are at fault for Clements’ humiliation. The school district deserves to be sued, and no one there should direct one word of rebuke to the student staff of the school paper. They were betrayed and abandoned. The reason adults have supervisory roles is to remind students about such relevant topics as the Golden Rule, defamation, fairness, journalistic ethics, and that the episode of “Friends” in which Joey’s photo for an ad agency turned up in a city-wide anti-gonorrhea campaign may be funny on TV, but isn’t an appropriate model for a real-life joke.
If only there had been someone to remind the supervisors about diligence, responsibility, and accountability.
Ethics Alarms 
I remember when the students wanted to do an article each week about what girls were rumored to be pregnant. They didn’t understand why the faculty advisor told them no. They even tried to hold a protest, stating that their first amendment rights had been violated. Well, now I know where today’s journalists came from.
That last sentence may have seemed flippant, but the students who work on the high school papers go on to work on college papers and then become the journalists of tomorrow. At every institution I have ever been, “don’t talk to the student newspaper” is the rule. The amount of misinformation, fabrication of quotes, and sloppiness in college journalism is outrageous. Their advisors are too overworked or too beaten down to challenge the lax and corrupt form of journalism practiced by the students. I am afraid that the bad habits formed in such environments have been carried over to “professional” journalism.
When school administrators don’t know the difference between journalism and “tabloidism”, how do they expect the students to? Those kids look to what passes for journalism today and simply imitate it.