A Texas A&M student claims the school's student newspaper has a left-wing bias in its opinion section.
Texas Scorecard reports student, Justino Russell, did research on articles in the student paper, The Battalion, after it rejected an opinion piece of his that was a response to an anonymous professor's open letter to the student body.
The school has a strong military history, requiring military training as part of its training at its inception. The requirement is no longer in place.
The Corps of Cadets, established at the same time, remains the oldest student organization on campus.
But left-leaning student media persists, according to Russell, who claimed there was an almost 17-1 liberal-to-conservative article ratio in an open letter to The Battalion’s editor.
He analyzed the paper's opinion section and read 196 opinion, review, satire, and criticism pieces published since last year's federal election.
Russell found that 60 were of a political nature with 50 of those being left-leaning and only three that were conservative.
Sherry Sylvester is a Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
"School newspapers are put out by journalism students who apparently don't know anything about journalism. If you're looking at opinion, you've got to look at balance, and they may not even understand what balance is, as we see every day in reading the news often.
“That ratio is not unprecedented. If you look at the New York Times, there's always one conservative columnist. You know, Scott Jennings is on CNN. There's one conservative guy."
She also added that it's not surprising that a faculty member wanted to be anonymous in an open letter.
"The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which is not a conservative group, one of the things that they report among faculty is over half of faculty members are afraid to speak out for fear of retaliation."
