A Question of Free Speech?

On April 11, you printed a grossly inaccurate article concerning an inflammatory and racist article in the Los Angeles Valley College newspaper, the Valley Star, written by the Star’s Editor in Chief Chris Mayda.

Although all of the pertinent facts were made available to your reporter, he chose to take a few unverified and insignificant facts out of context while ignoring the underlying truths.

As a result, Mayda has been and continues to be erroneously cast in the role of champion of free speech and the First Amendment. She is wrongly perceived to be a courageous heroine, defending her paper against censorship at all cost. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Most other staff members had been deprived of their right to participate in the production of the paper; their right to use the paper as a learning experience; and their own First Amendment rights. Even the opinion page editors, who complain that they hold their positions in name only, have been denied the right of access to their own page, much less the right to review or edit its contents. Both of those editors were among the protesters who spoke out at the demonstration against the racial slurs contained in Mayda’s offensive article.

I am a former staff writer for the Valley Star as well as a former editor in chief of Crown, Valley College’s magazine.

Mayda operates the campus paper from her home because she needs total control. That control includes suppressing criticism. Until recently, when I filed a lawsuit against her accusing her of just such suppression, she refused to publish any letters containing significant criticism of her editorial policies and writings.

The only students allowed to participate are those who have declared their loyalty to Mayda.

The paper is now the functional equivalent of an underground newspaper, which speaks only with the voice of Mayda--racist, sexist, bigoted, anti-Semitic, arrogant, inaccurate and not even very well expressed.

Your readers should know more about their heroine and the “free speech” she is so eager to protect. You did not publish those parts of Mayda’s racist diatribe that raised the level of controversy and caused the present uproar, thereby misleading your readers into giving her their uninformed support.

Here are some excerpts from the article in question:

“Is it better to take the chance and have 10 children and hope that maybe one will escape the ghetto and be the special anointed ones to save the people from the life they have brought on themselves with continuous pregnancy, crowds and crime?”

“Do ghetto inhabitants not rejoice when one of theirs becomes a success and lives the life they watch on sitcom TV night after night, in search of a reality that has eluded them?”

“Those in power will not lose what they have, so the rest, the masses, will be forced to share an ever-shortened supply of space, money, water and air.”

“So the educated, the powerful, they raise one special child and give that child everything they can. The uneducated, they keep having babies, one after another, either oblivious to birth control, blocked by the power of their faith or spiteful to the decrees of the powerful.”

I am a staunch believer in the First Amendment; but neither Chris Mayda nor anyone else has an unrestricted right to publish, in a publicly funded student newspaper, racial, ethnic, religious or sexist denigrations.

JAE LEVINE WEISS, Sherman Oaks