Fairness and the First Amendment

COEUR d’ALENE — Young minds took a deep dive with a historian from Washington, D.C., on Wednesday as they explored a cornerstone of democracy that continues to be a hot button issue — the First Amendment.

The seventh- and eighth-grade students in Geoff Heald's history class at Lake City Academy participated in a virtual conference with Jessi Hollis McCarthy, outreach educator for the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation that works to foster First Amendment freedoms for all.

The students learned about their right to freely assemble, their ability to petition the government for change, the difference between opinion and fact, the scourge of fake news, the importance of fairness in reporting, how to pinpoint media bias and when words cross the line from being freedom of speech into the territory of inciting harm.

"There's an immediacy factor to it," McCarthy explained. "I can't use my words to start a fight. I can't use my words to bully someone or harass them. I can't use my words or my publication, my press, to tell a lie to get someone in trouble."

She introduced the concept of "true threats," "when our words are scary to another person," and how much inflection and context matter.

"Starting a fight, that's called 'incitement' to crime or violence. It's got to be immediate, so how does the law think about that?" McCarthy asked. "The First Amendment protects my right to say, 'It's fun to throw rocks at buildings.' Don't do that, that is actually a crime. But my words are protected."

Gathering people together to throw rocks at a building to cause damage, however, would fall under this term.

"It could be as small as a fire warning to bigger incidences, where, say, someone's words start a riot or a fight or cause people to break the law and commit very serious crime," McCarthy said. "There would be higher punishment for that."

The students' questions traversed a wide swath of scenarios, from the legalities of a social media company removing comments to getting fined for squabbling with siblings.

"If you're yelling at your little sister, your parents might get you in trouble, and you can't say, 'My First Amendment rights protect me," Heald interjected, his students giggling. "It doesn't really apply in that situation."

The conversation shifted into partisanship, skewed reporting and the necessity of consuming information from a variety of sources. One student piped up: "Why don't we have one political party for everything, like the Republicats?"

The students then completed an exercise dissecting a news story reported by two different outlets and pinpointing what was biased, misleading and unfair.

"It's interesting to learn more about being a reporter and to go in depth about the First Amendment," eighth-grader Evie Andrus said. "I definitely think I'm going to be more in tune with the articles I read. I'm going to look out for extreme words and suggestive bias."

Seventh-grader Jesse Flemming said this First Amendment lesson has attuned him to left- and right-leaning information.

"It made me focus on the center points," he said. "I think it was pretty interesting."

Eighth-grader Cambrie Stam said picking apart the news articles helped show her how bias can be present in articles and everyday conversations.

"I feel like now, I'm going to watch what I say and read things more carefully," she said. "I didn't realize how you can say things so easily and not realize you're leaning to one side or the other."