This week what is going on at America's college campuses in America's

college newsrooms and does it matter to the rest of us?

Welcome to this week's Reliable Sources Podcast.

I'm your host, Brian Stelter,

and this weekly podcast is our chance to go more in depth

with media leaders and newsmakers, talking about how the news gets made and

the news often starts on college campuses, journalists get their training on campuses,

working for student newspapers.

There's a storied tradition of this, of course.

But every so often these controversies bubble up involving student newsrooms

and the practices of student journalists.

And we're seeing one of these weeks right now.

The Daily Northwestern has been in the news.

That's the independent student newspaper at Northwestern University because of an apology that the student journalists issued for in essence just doing great reporting for covering protests that occurred on campus during a speech

delivered by Jeff Sessions. This is complicated and really interesting. The backlash

to the Daily Northwestern was severe and it seemed like

professional journalists were all dunking on these college students and that's

when Charles Whitaker weighed in.

He's the dean of Northwestern University's Madill School of Journalism, Media, and

Integrated Marketing Communications.

He wrote, basically an open letter to everybody trying to lower the temperature and trying to

get us to think a little bit differently about these issues.

...