Creating a Martyr Instead of a Model

Not that I need to feel any older, but nothing does the trick like hearing from someone you interviewed 12 years ago. Unfortunately, in another reminder of old age, I had to check the archives to see exactly what I’d written in April 1993 about Elizabeth Bangs that prompted her to write last week.

Turns out that Bangs, a 1993 Sunny Hills High School graduate and now a lecturer in political science at Princeton, keeps up with her hometown Fullerton news. And she was most interested in the plight of Troy High School senior Ann Long, who has been threatened with losing her job as editor-in-chief of the school paper -- if she doesn’t resign -- for writing a story on three gay Troy students.

In a way, Bangs has been there, done that.

And I’m trying to figure out why Fullerton Joint Union High School District officials, who got it so right 12 years ago when Bangs was a student editor at Sunny Hills, now got it so wrong.

First, the history. Bangs was editor during the school’s darkest moment. Five of its students were charged in the murder of a Foothill High student. Far from licking her chops over the “big story,” Bangs felt the immediate pressure, spoken and unspoken, from the entire Sunny Hills community about how to play the story. School papers are about school news, not sensational murder cases involving students.

Bangs did herself and her paper proud. She ran photos of the suspects, not from the school yearbook, but of them in custody. She authorized a front-page story, which she co-wrote, plus four other stories inside.

I praised Bangs for personal and journalistic integrity under fire and gave kudos to the school administration: “To its everlasting credit, the Sunny Hills administration let Elizabeth and the [school paper] staff make the final decision.”

Let’s move on to 2005 and the presumably more enlightened world that Ann Long lives in. She interviewed the three students and wrote about their decision to reveal their sexual orientation to family and friends. The students, Long said, knew their names would be used and, obviously, consented to the interviews.

School district officials, for reasons I don’t get, are playing hardball with Long, saying she violated a state education code that requires parental permission before asking students about such matters. The code would seem to apply to teachers and administrators, and may not have envisioned student newspapers getting the story.

Long claims ignorance of the code and says she wasn’t called off by her journalism advisor, who knew about the story before it was published. Troy officials referred our reporter to a school district official, who told him that the problem isn’t the subject matter or freedom of speech. Rather, she said, “Confidentiality and privacy rights are the issue.”

That’s parsing it rather finely.

I can’t voice my displeasure any better than Elizabeth Bangs, who wrote: “I teach bright, idealistic college students that the primary purpose of public education is to teach students to be democratic citizens by encouraging them to exercise their First Amendment rights, engage in civilized debate and make reasoned decisions.”

Bangs lamented that Long didn’t get the same support from her school as she had gotten 12 years ago.

It’s inconceivable to me that officials are holding Long solely accountable for not getting parental permission, especially given the hot-button nature of the story. She’s the journalist, not the school administrator.

So what’s going on here?

Whatever their intent, district officials have made a journalistic martyr out of Ms. Long.

That’s a badge of distinction that not even Bangs, her sister in arms from a decade ago, got a chance to wear.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at [email protected]. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.