Throughout the morning of Oct. 8, the Iowa State Daily received reports that newspapers were being taken from the news stands and thrown away in the trash. Upon later investigation, those reports were confirmed.

The people who decided to throw away the Iowa State Daily took away students’ rights to read the information from that day’s publication. They took away students’ rights to be informed on a feminist movement that is making its way through campus. They took away students’ rights to formulate opinions about political and entertainment based topics.

These people took away students’ right, and the community’s right to educate themselves.

By throwing away the Iowa State Daily newspapers, those people took away a platform for students to better themselves as members of the ISU community and made a decision for students on what they could and could not read.

Newspapers serve as a huge benefit to the members of a community. Whether one agrees with the content in the publication or not, a newspaper has information the public needs, wants and deserves to know about.

“That we hear of, [stealing newspapers] happens a few dozen times every year. Maybe two or three dozen times a year that we hear about,” said Adam Goldstein, attorney advocate at the Student Press Law Center. “People steal newspapers because in the short term it works. They steal newspapers for the same reason they take drugs, it’s an immediate solution to problems. The long term effects are not as positive.”

Throwing away newspapers is censorship and a crime. Newspaper theft is not new. It happens to professional newspapers, college papers all over the country and as of yesterday, it is happening at Iowa State. A series of cases regarding newspaper theft have been tried and successfully prosecuted in the past.

One of the biggest functions of the Iowa State Daily is to serve the public by providing complete, fair and accurate reporting. Whether you agree or disagree with that statement, it is not the choice of a few people to decide what information is or isn’t pertinent to the Iowa State community.

At the Daily, we do our best to serve ISU students and anyone else who might read our coverage. We understand we fail at times and misreport, but we do our best to learn so that when we enter the next steps in our career, we don’t make those same mistakes.  

The people who took away the Iowa State Daily took away students’ rights to information, and it took away the journalists’ rights to provide that information. The Iowa State Daily is not going to stop reporting the news. We are not going to quit doing our jobs as public servants, and will not refuse the Iowa State community the right to information. Something will need to be done about the people who chose to steal news and information from the Iowa State community, and we can only hope that something like this will not happen again.