In 2005, after incidents of censorship by the IHS administration, The Tattler was banned on school campus. Publication of the newspaper went underground, and copies nicknamed “The Issue,” were distributed in secret. Although The Tattler was eventually reinstated at the high school, a decade-long legal battle followed as students sued for independence from the administration and protection of their First Amendment freedom. I recently sat down with Robert Ochshorn, the editor-in-chief of The Tattler during this period, to hear his take on the events. Ochshorn now lives in California, where he manages his start-up company with a fellow Tattler alumnus.
Valentina Lebret ‘25: How did you come to be involved in the Tattler, if it became such a big part of your life?
Robert Ochshorn ‘05: I started through photography. In freshman year, I started taking pictures for the newspaper, and then I didn’t like the way they were printed. They were fuzzy. So I was like: What’s going on in layout? Can I help here? And then from there, somehow The Tattler and my life became so enmeshed that I couldn’t separate one from the other.
VL: There was a precedent of censorship before the big February issue with the cartoon. Do you remember anything about that period?
RO: The tension had been building around in particular a new principal, who didn’t understand why, when he was running the high school, he didn’t have control over the newspaper.
VL: So that tension hadn’t been there when you were starting as a writer or photographer?
RO: I was there during this transition from a very experienced teacher who had been advising the paper for decades to a brand new faculty member who was put in that position, and as a result didn’t have the same kind of job protection and was much more vulnerable to administrative pressure, but also was less experienced. So [the tension] built slowly over the year […] The basic succession was that we really pissed off the principal with an article about one of his slip-ups that he just hoped would disappear.
VL: What was the article?
RO: Basically, he had walked into an AP Bio course full of Ithaca High School’s overachievers, many of whom had booked themselves so solid they didn’t even have a lunch period. The teacher, who was respectful of these ambitious students, would sometimes let them eat in class which, as you may or may not know, violates [some] guidelines, and the new principal was very keen on enforcing all the rules […]
So he walked into this Bio course where people were eating, and he kind of clumsily made a Seinfeld reference. He referred to himself as a “food nazi,” trying to be funny, and saying he would send the teacher to the “food gas chamber” and went on and on and on about it. There was a student who had just moved from Germany who was stunned and complained to the superintendent, and we put that story on the front page of The Tattler. We had also been increasing the circulation of the newspaper within the community, so it was very embarrassing for the principal. That’s when he put new guidelines in place that said unambiguously that he and the administration have the final say of what gets printed.
That came to a head the following month when we were writing this story about sex education and the No Child Left Behind funding, illustrating it with these stick figure drawings. That was the first instance where the administration exercised their final say and said, “This cannot be printed.” So then it was just a mess from there; there was a blank spot in the paper, the advisor resigned from that role, and so we went underground. We couldn’t distribute the paper we had made in my parents’ bedroom and couldn’t be on school property.
VL: What made you decide to fight for this instead of just bending to their will and removing the cartoon?
RO: I don’t know if it’s still this way in Ithaca, but when I was a student, people were serious about what they were doing. [We were] sons and daughters of university professors, people who were raised to believe that thought and ideas and communication were important, and who were devoting their lives around thinking and writing. It was also during the Iraq war when the media was in this heightened state of censorship, and I think we were reflecting the national state around media and censorship […]
We had met with someone from an NFP in DC called the Student Press Law Center, which was devoted to the idea that student journalists had rights. We taught ourselves a lot about press law and believed that it was within our rights to run the paper as we had been doing, but it was one step at a time in deciding that we needed to draw a line somewhere. I think the school district was very savvy about how to censor by making an obscenity claim. If you’ve seen this drawing you’d know on the face of it that it’s an absurd claim.
VL: How did the underground issue come about? Did the board agree? How did you do this without an advisor? Did you have to pay for the printing out of pocket?
RO: That was our test for how independent we actually were. We were already soliciting ads in the community and were fundraising ourselves. So we continued to do that. By being able to print this issue without any school resources we proved to ourselves that we were as independent as thought we were.
VL: What was the community response to the issue being pulled, to The Issue being published?
RO: We had really strong support in the local newspapers in The Ithaca Journal, The Ithaca Times, and The Cornell Sun. So the media had our back. I was on a local public access TV show, and we wound up making an advisory board of faculty for the underground newspaper. I showed up to the TV show with my computer science teacher from IHS who was supportive of the idea.
VL: How did The Tattler become reinstated at IHS?
RO: We went underground for three months and a local attorney agreed to represent us pro bono in a federal First Amendment case, so it could have been related to that, but I’m not sure how we came back to do the last issue of the year for the school.
VL: I read that it was forbidden to have a Tattler on campus. How did you distribute it to the student body?
RO: We just stood right outside of the campus line and passed them out. Obviously, if something is banned, everyone wants to read it.
VL: How did the case turn out so that they rejected your appeal?
RO: It lasted almost ten years before a court dismissed many of our claims. I was really annoyed because so many of the school tactics were just to wait us out and see if maybe the next batch of students wouldn’t be such troublemakers, and if the school could delay justice that’s not justice at all. I’m not a legal scholar or lawyer but the most sympathetic argument that I’ve come up with about the courts is that it was 2004–2005, and that might have been the last moment in human history that talking about the distribution of a physical object was relevant. Even during our time, we were putting our issues online. I could imagine that ten years later, the idea that the court needs to make a decision about the distribution of a print newspaper feels a little silly given how many speech issues are moving onto Instagram. So maybe that’s the main thing the court said, that whatever the decision they make on this case it’s unlikely to have much of an impact on the lives of people who are at the school today, but I was disappointed.
I also feel hopeful because it’s unclear what the impact of anything that happens in the courts will be. Sometimes these judgements and preliminary things get used in ways you don’t expect and get used as precedent. I know that not all of our claims were thrown out and that there was some opening that our constitutional rights might have been violated, and that’s stated in the legal record.
VL: Is there anything else that you’d want to say about the 2005 Controversy?
RO: For a long time after I really craved the intensity of the work of the newspaper. I edited a magazine in undergrad and it was just so simple. There weren’t the same stakes, [the sense] that it really mattered, and I missed an environment that had that kind of meaning.