Fresno State Students Reject Free Access to “Problematic” NYT

Student leaders at California State University, Fresno, don’t want free subscriptions to The New York Times, according to The Fresno Bee. 

Last week, Associated Students Inc.—Fresno State’s student government association—rejected a proposal to spend $15,705 to give students digital subscriptions to the Times, considered the newspaper of record for the United States.  

Criticism of the newspaper’s coverage partially drove the decision.

Alya Hassan, a student official who voted against the proposal, accused The New York Times of lacking journalistic integrity for telling reporters to avoid using certain terms, such as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory” in coverage of the Israel–Gaza war. 

“The New York Times has historically been a little bit problematic and controversial in their reporting and in their journalism,” Hassan said during a discussion before the vote. “If we were to fund this using student fees, we would essentially be endorsing The New York Times’ editorial positions and their narratives, and that’s where my hesitation comes in.”

Hassan and other student officials also questioned if there was enough demand to warrant paying for the subscription. But Sarah Sevy, the student official who put forth the proposal, said she’s heard from lots of students who said they’d be interested in a subscription to access news articles, as well as the outlet’s popular cooking and gaming apps like Wordle. 

Instead of paying the $30-a-month standard sticker price for an individual digital subscription to the Times, Sevy said the proposal would only cost 67 cents per person in student fees. 

“I don’t feel like it’s irresponsible considering some of the other things we spend student fees on,” Sevy said. “Like, do we need tailgates? We still do them because they are fun and they provide a good-quality experience to students on campus.”

More than 10 million college students—including those at Harvard University, the University of California and New York University—already have free access to The New York Times, and about 25 percent of those students actually use their subscription, Todd Halvorsen, a Times representative, told the students at the meeting. 

As for questions about the paper’s quality, Halvorsen said he couldn’t comment on editorial decisions—“that’s not my side of the business”—but asserted that the paper’s record speaks for itself. “We have 145 Pulitzer prizes,” he said. “More than any other news organization.”