Tempted though many of you may have been to toss every copy of The Eagle into the trash, nobody has actually done it yet. Thank you for that and - ahem - please don't start!
At The Catholic University of America, the readers have not been so kind. After a series of controversial articles concerning gay rights, an angry student - or group of students - tossed every copy of CUA's newspaper, The Tower, into the trash. As a result, The Tower may need to reimburse advertisers who ran ads in the trashed issue, possibly leading to thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
And while a few thousand trashed newspapers miles away on a completely different campus may not directly concern AU, the truth is that censorship, in any form, is a serious issue that concerns everyone. Freedom of the press is not something simply guaranteed by words written on a 200 year-old piece parchment but by the actions of people today. Without the active defense of the freedom of the press, those immortal words become worthless. Those who saw the trashing of the newspapers at CUA - and there were eyewitnesses - had a duty to report the vandals as soon as possible.
Student media may seem inconsequential, and no one knows better than us that news can get slow at a 6,000-student university, but that doesn't mean the existence of a student watchdog is also inconsequential. We implore the student body to keep writing angry letters to the editor as opposed to simply tossing The Eagle into the garbage. Not for us, but for the future students of AU.
