Schools

DHS Student Wins 1st Amendment Essay Contest

Fikrea Tesema wrote, "The idea that everyone has the right to be aware of the things going on around him or her is the message of the American belief."

 

Fikrea Tesema, a junior at Decatur High, won first place in the First Amendment Essay Contest, sponsored by the University of Georgia’s Georgia Scholastic Press Association, the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Cox Institute for Newspaper Management Studies.

She won $100 and the same amount went to her school magazine, Carpe Diem.

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Here is her essay:

The First Amendment is arguably the most important amendment given to us by the Bill of Rights. This amendment gives us both the right and responsibility of displaying information. To people born in other countries, this right is rarely available and seldom exercised. That is why I viewed this amendment as a fundamental benefit of being an American.

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The idea that everyone has the right to be aware of the things going on around him or her is the message of the American belief. I was born in Ethiopia and when I lived there I remember that people were afraid to discuss anything negative about our government. The newspaper agencies and magazine staffs could not legally print out anything that represented the government in a bad manner. Information that was remotely close to disapproving of government was quickly shutdown or punished.


Yet when I came to America, I saw shows like Saturday Night Live, and Mad TV make fun of presidents and candidates. In fact the comics within newspapers often showed them in a ridiculing manner. This was different to me because I had never seen such a public display of opinion about government. This initial experience in the U.S. affected me so much that I wanted to write and have some type of control over what went out in the media. I wanted to exercise a new right that I was never given before and I was hooked.


The yearning to exercise the right to free speech motivated me into wanting more authority and obligation over media. So I joined our school’s feature magazine. There I learned in depth, that although the first amendment is a right, it also teaches you responsibility.


My first story within our magazine was about a girl who had become a teen mom. The story proved to be challenging to me because I thought the readers had right to know what was going on within the student body. I had a responsibility to not bring any harm and harassment onto the person I was interviewing. This challenged me because I had responsibility to not bring harm or harassment onto the person I was interviewing. This challenged me because with the topic of teen pregnancy everyone has their opinions of the mother, and because this girl whom I interviewed did not tell many people about her situation, so the story was going to be the first unveiling of this information and this caused the mother to worry about being teased.


In order to satisfy my job and my emotions I tried to convey the story in a way that did not put the mother in a dark light, but at the same time stayed true to the topic at hand. So within my first entrance to our schools publication I learned the responsible aspects of the freedom of speech.


Throughout the whole process the First Amendment of free press affected the way I conveyed my stories. I learned in depth that the First Amendment not only had the perks of free speech, but also the charge of responsibility as well. For this reason I view myself as fortunate to have come to the U.S. and learn not only exercising my freedom of speech but also controlling it.


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