Throughout the year of 2025, President Donald Trump has taken some actions against the First Amendment rights of newspaper organizations like NPR, or National Public Radio, and The Wall Street Journal; these amendments stand for freedom of speech and the freedom of the press.
President Trump is cutting funding to public newspaper organizations and broadcasting organizations. To NPR and PBS, President Trump cut around 1.1 billion dollars to their funding (aclu.org). Recently, President Trump’s administration, the Department of Defense, attempted to implement a policy requiring Pentagon workers to sign a document not to disclose unauthorized information.
For anyone who isn’t a journalist, this act doesn’t seem important at all. However, there is a very important reason as to why it’s impactful.. This funding cut also affects student journalists like me and all of the publications staff at West Albany High School.
Journalism is such an important tool for getting out the truth. Although some journalists and newspaper/broadcasting organizations don’t always use their platform to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, as a student journalist, it’s all I would like to do. Cutting the funding for these organizations and making certain organizations sign to the government to say that they won’t let out anything that the government doesn’t want them to say goes against the First Amendment right to have freedom of the press. If funding is cut, then that makes information harder to get out to the people of the United States and anywhere else that reads, in turn making it next to impossible to get out information.
I don’t like this, not just because of what it is doing to public organizations, but what this is doing to student journalists like myself. How am I supposed to know I’m writing the truth and giving the truth out to my district if other organizations are under the government and only saying what they want them to say? It affects my current job in the school, and also my future in writing.
You might be saying, “Why does this matter to me? I don’t want to be a journalist”.
No matter what someone wants to be or what their political status is, they want to be told the truth; many people don’t like being lied to. No one likes the idea of not having the right to freedom of speech.
No matter who you are or what your beliefs are, I advise you to research the world around you and how everything that doesn’t seem to affect you affects you.
