What’s scarier than tales of a haunted house on Halloween?

…complete with ghosts howling and zombies grabbing for your hair?

Photo by Aron Jäger on Unsplash.

By Candace Bowen, MJE

If you’ve been keeping track of news about student media, you probably know the answer: increased prior review, censorship and student journalist punishments for covering perfectly legal topics. Sometimes this has even meant removing an adviser from that position – or at least using that as a threat to “encourage” student journalists not to get their favorite teacher “in trouble.”

Boo! And are you next???

You never know what’s around the corner in a spook house or in a school, even if it has not had prior review for decades. But after the district recently was taken over by the state for problems at one campus out of 200+ in the district, the newly appointed superintendent had made some really unpopular changes districtwide. Student journalists at one school were eager to cover this, but they had been getting a runaround.

One day when that school’s yearbook adviser was calmly eating lunch at her desk, she heard a crash in the newspaper room next door. That adviser came running in, all upset. “Did the principal come to see you?!” No, he hadn’t. But the newspaper adviser then said the principal told her if she let her students pursue coverage of the takeover, he couldn’t protect her job. The breaking glass was her dropping her lunch when he said that. Although the yearbook adviser figured she and her students would be next, that didn’t happen, and they ran their coverage, saying the principal “did not respond to requests for comment.”

Months later, she found out the reason the principal never came: He told her yearbooks aren’t journalism and should focus on happy moments.

Disappearing acts…

Now you see it, now you don’t.

When a New Jersey high school’s Muslim Student Association had its picture taken for the 2024 yearbook, two students in the back row held up a Palestinian flag. But when the yearbook came out at the end of the school year, the flag was gone and the two students holding it had been cropped into the last row of students, according to NJ.com’s reporter, Matthew Enuco.

Students and parents, one of them a member of American Muslims for Palestine, complained that other flags were included in yearbook club photos, and they felt this was singling out the Muslim students. The superintendent of schools said it seemed like a protest and this wasn’t the place for it. He apologized….but not for having the flag removed, but for not warning the students the photo had become altered before the books were distributed.

Hidden ghosts…

Colleges and universities have long used the technique of an unseen censor. In most cases, this is someone in charge of the school’s media relations. This person informs staff not to talk to reporters without getting permission from him or her, which, of course, most are afraid to do – but also then afraid to give out any information.

In many cases this might be a janitor or groundskeeper, and if the reporter was covering damage or timing of an event, these are the very people who would know the answers, but they would be afraid to tell the reporter. The real censor didn’t have to say a word.

In-Your-Face-Scary…

College students aren’t safe from more blatant censorship, even those at well-respected universities with award-winning news outlets. The Indiana Daily Student editors said they were told in early October this year their upcoming print edition could only be about homecoming. Only homecoming?!  That sounds like censorship.

Meetings between university officials, Indiana Daily Student co-editors and IDS adviser and student media director Jim Rodenbush didn’t change the situation. Their print budget was cut, and Rodenbush was dismissed, thus ending more than 150 years of print journalism at the university.

While the university chancellor maintained it was a financial decision, others disagree. JEA members with ties to The Media School at IU have posted about withholding donations. And the Indiana High School Press Association, in an Oct. 20, 2025 post, indicated these recent actions do not reflect the “shared values” IHSPA thought it had with Indiana University and The Media School, and, thus, “is suspending its relationship with them effective immediately.”  For now, that’s the situation.

So, if you’re celebrating Halloween with ghosts and goblins and other frightening creatures, let’s hope they will disappear at the end of the night…and not have any resemblance to the ones we see trying to haunt our student media.