A pair of incidents that involved restrictions around campus-based public radio stations should raise alarms about government threats to press freedom, a First Amendment advocate argues in a missive that calls for greater protections for journalistic independence for campus-based news outlets.
“The vulnerability of university-affiliated journalism is rooted in broader political pressures facing public higher education,” wrote Timothy Richardson, director of the Journalism and Disinformation program at PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to free expression.
“It’s time to put in place structural protections that ensure these public media newsrooms can report freely, without political interference, even as polarization rises.”
Richardson cites a couple of incidents that took place, respectively, at WBHM, a public radio station housed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and KUT, a public radio station housed at the University of Texas-Austin.
In the case of WBHM, Richardson writes, University of Alabama at Birmingham officials told the station’s staff, who are university employees, that they must follow a new state law that took effect Oct. 1 and requires state and local government entities to use “Gulf of America” when describing the body of water historically known as the Gulf of Mexico. The law – initiated by Republicans – follows a similar 2025 executive order by President Donald Trump.
Will Dahlberg told PEN America that he resigned as WBHM’s executive director and general manager in part because he didn’t believe it was right to have to kowtow to a mandate on how to describe the gulf, which he would make the radio station more like state-owned media.
In the case of KUT, university officials fired the station’s general manager, Debbie Hiott, to end a dispute over a festival that Hiott planned to hold on campus featuring Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), as well as congressional members from both parties, authors, and local officials, Richardson writes.
The university ordered Hiott to hold the festival off campus due to lack of planning for safety for the festival, but Hiott has disputed that her firing was due to the university’s professed concern over the safety of festival-goers, as opposed to the content of the festival itself.
Richardson credited Illinois with being the first state to pass a law that sets up editorial protections for public media outlets licensed by universities. Among other things, the law states that content produced by news organizations at state-sponsored colleges and universities is not subject to prior review by college and university officials.
