One of the major disagreements was the issue of “external agitators,” a narrative pushed by the Columbia administration and the NYPD that the protests were populated by demonstrators from outside the campus community. Student journalists also had to contend with this: In a report on the protests, Ventura and a classmate noted that most of the 13 outside agitators identified by the university were either alumni or people associated with organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine has a chapter in Columbia. Karam told WIRED that the Viewers still trying to verify these numbers. Despite their reporting to the contrary, New York Mayor Eric Adams still said in a statement last week that the protests in Colombia had been “essentially hijacked by professional, outside agitators.”
Likewise Leon Orlov-Sullivan, a reporter at the City College of New York The campus, told us that the school’s statements didn’t make it clear what it meant by “external” protesters. City College is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, meaning that students from other CUNY schools often have access to the City College campus using their ID.
“It was not clear in media reports and administration communications how many people in total were connected to the CUNY system,” Orlov-Sullivan said. “While I was in camp, I would say the vast majority of people were connected to a CUNY system in some way.”
In another story, Columbia News Service’s Ventura provided an overview of where on campus the protests actually took place. In part, she says, to make it clear to readers that while the camps outwardly dominated the headlines, in reality they occupied only a small portion of the campus.
Stories from student journalists at the Viewers were subjected to extensive editing and fact-checking, knowing that they would be read by a larger audience than just the student body. Each protest report went through seven rounds of editing, with editors fact-checking every line, Karam said.
Other schools where protests took place emphasized live updates rather than debunking false claims. “We don’t feel like we necessarily have the resources or the institutional support to do comprehensive fact-checking,” said University of Wisconsin reporter Cat Carroll Badger Herald newspaper, it told us. “We are the only ones here reporting live updates and providing information day after day.”
Elea Castiglione, student reporter at the Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper, noted that police had not arrested any students at their school’s protests and that the encampment was peaceful. “Every school is unique,” she says. “And I think college newspapers in particular have done a really good job of focusing on what’s actually happening in our schools and not perfectly fitting our schools into a larger narrative of current student activism.”
At a time when trust in the media is sorely low, student journalists managed to demonstrate the skills needed to build trust within a community and push back against sensationalist narratives and disinformation – even when they came from people and institutions which had far more performance.