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Censorship language found in college newspaper contracts

Last month College Publisher, a Boston-based software company that manages the Web sites and archives of over 500 college newspapers nationwide (including The Daily Gamecock and The (Clemson) Tiger) was forced to change wording in its renewal contract with a university paper in Hawaii after a specific clause was found in it that forbade the paper to report negatively on anything owned by parent company Viacom International, Inc.

According to the initial contract, the University of Hawaii–Manoa’s college newspaper, Ka Leo O Hawaii, would not have been allowed print any content that was “damaging or injurious to [College Publisher], Content Partners or any of its respective affiliates, related entities, licensees or assignees,” as written in the terms of use section of the newspaper’s contract with College Publisher.

As a juggernaut media conglomerate that owns (“seriously, like everything, man,”) MTV, Paramount Pictures, VH1, Comedy Central, DreamWorks and over 100 worldwide networks, Viacom has seemed to positioned itself to have a near-monopoly on youth-oriented media and has at least once tried to act as a gatekeeper, inhibiting the flow of information that college students receive from their university papers.

And while College Publisher tried to tell at least one student newspaper what it could or could not print, the company continues to load up both the print and Web editions of its student publication networks with slick, pre-packaged national advertisements traded out so the college newspapers can have Web sites that are professionally maintained at no physical cost to the universities.

Scott Lindenberg, USC’s director of student media, said that Carolina was one of the earliest universities to partner with College Publisher (they partnered before the Viacom buy out), and because of it The Daily Gamecock does not have a signed contract with the company. Even so, College Publisher does maintain The Daily Gamecock’s Web site and also controls about five years of its archives online, Lindenberg said.

Were the company to ever put any contractual language in front of him that could potentially restrict the journalistic integrity of The Daily Gamecock staff, Lindenberg said it would be up to the student editors to decide whether or not they wanted to continue the business relationship or try to negotiate a new contract. For The Daily Gamecock, so far the deal they share with College Publisher is a good one – it runs the paper’s Web site free of charge and makes it easy for the editors to maintain control over the content without having to design a Web template themselves. So far, knock on wood, the paper hasn’t been asked to run any of the company’s national ads.

Before the days of College Publisher, student newspaper Web sites were often designed and run by the student staff, the university, or sometimes by a private software company. With the rise in new media and the inevitability of student-staff turnover running about every two to four years, maintaining a college newspaper’s Web site used to be a lot more difficult.

For a while The Tiger used a software company called New Media Group to run their Web site, according to Clemson University’s assistant director of student media, Patrick Neal, who also said the paper there had signed a contract with College Publisher as recently as Nov. 18. The reason? New Media Group merged with College Publisher. Neal said that as far as he knew The Tiger’s contract with College Publisher did not contain any contractual language prohibiting them to report negatively on any Viacom-owned company.

David Halperin, the director of Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress that is geared toward establishing a progressive voice for young people nationwide especially through a network of college journalists, told City Paper they currently do not have any monitoring projects in the works to apply oversight to companies such as College Publisher. He said he is wary of any contractual censorship language that any company would apply to college newspapers and called College Publisher’s relationship with campus networks and their advertising trades similar to many other “deals with the devil” in corporate America.

The student newspaper’s Web site had been shut down for nearly a month during the negotiation process, totally obliterating any online access.

According to Honolulu Weekly, when the Ka Leo O Hawaii noticed the censorship clause they tried to negotiate but the clause still remained. During the process student paper battled for about a month over the contract that would have initially censored them from reporting negatively on any Viacom-owned companies (like say, a bad review in the Mix section for any band signed to DreamWorks or a movie produced by Paramount) and eventually the offending language was removed from the contract.

In the meantime, journalist Ian Lind reported in Honolulu Weekly that the student newspaper’s Web site had been shut down for nearly a month during the negotiation process, totally obliterating any online access.

Lindenberg said that while he enjoys the no-contract relationship The Daily Gamecock currently shares with College Publisher, he wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of contract land on his desk following the publication of this report.

Viacom: a history of censorship

In January 2004 the Viacom-owned broadcast network CBS refused to air a commercial that was critical of President Bush’s fiscal policies during that year’s Super Bowl. During the controversy specific to the censorship of the ad, a 30-second spot made by MoveOn.org, The Nation’s John Nichols wrote that Viacom had been lobbying Congress to lift limits on media consolidation and monopoly, and quoted U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) as calling the censoring of the ad “Exhibit A in the case against media concentration.”

On the Senate floor Durbin later said, “The CBS eye has been closed to the truth and fairness” and expressed his belief that the Bush administration had wanted to lift restrictions on media conglomeration, specifically the number of television stations in a town or city that could be owned by Viacom.

In 2004, Viacom chairman Summer Redstone said a re-election by George W. Bush would be “good for Viacom.”

Hip to the product: how lame brands target the “college market”
Right now, a Massachusetts-owned company called Y2M owns College Publisher and the two share office space occupying the second floor of 100 City Hall Plaza in Boston’s high-rent North End district, according to their Web site.

Suitable enough in a city with loads of colleges within a 10-mile radius, Y2M is self-described as a marketing agency that specializes in marketing brands to the “college market” and has serviced national clients from Microsoft to Ford and seek out clients with the promise that they can get college kids hip to their product.

This is done it seems by using College Publisher as a feed line to place their clients’ national ads in their exponential network of student publications where they, College Publisher, maintain the Web sites while stuffing them full of ads for other Viacom-owned companies like MTVu.

It was in August of 2002 that MTVu, a 24-hour college-geared division of MTV, bought Y2M swamping both the marketing agency and College Publisher into the category of “subsidiaries” under the large umbrella of Viacom, which is MTV’s parent company.

By essentially owning College Publisher it’s no wonder Viacom wouldn’t want any negative coverage of any its companies appearing in the pages of the same college newspapers they utilize with the sole purpose of generating ad money for College Publisher and Y2M. (Full disclosure: newspapers often run any stories defending the First Amendment strictly because they are vested in what defending it secures.)

MTVu, Y2M and College Publisher share the same communications manager, Jason Rzekpa, who told Honolulu Weekly that MTVu’s business and legal contracts manager along with the vice president of university relations took out the College Publisher censorship clause with the Ka Leo O Hawaii. The clause was put in, he said, so that the college newspapers could not have any leverage during contract negotiations and not an attempt to restrict what the papers could print.

While Y2M’s major play in this circle of media ownership is to provide national ads that end up on the Web sites and in the pages of the college newspapers, an internal survey by Y2M itself found that students want to see more local ads in their newspapers.

While the issue of an eroding freedom of the press and First Amendment rights has been highlighted by the recent involvements of journalists during the Scooter Libby trial, with the government as the bad guy, it is becoming increasingly more important to look for any censorship coming from the private sector as well.

Last month, a state law in Illinois was making its way through the General Assembly there that would protect college journalists from university censorship. Under the law, called the College Campus Press Act, public universities would become “public forums” and would not be subject to administrative review of any kind.

At USC, Scott Lindenberg said The Daily Gamecock is not subject to prior review from administrators.

“This is integral to a free press and something we take very seriously,” he said, and reiterated that during his time in student media no censorship of The Daily
Gamecock has ever occurred.

As for City Paper’s reporting on College Publisher and the no-contract agreement The Daily Gamecock share with them and whether or not it may jeopardize that relationship, Lindenberg laments.

“It probably wouldn’t help,” he said.