News coverage of challenges

For our assignment this week, we have to write a paper on an "intellectual freedom challenge" in a library. So, I went looking for challenges to write about. I've ended up writing about the semi-famous "Bunny Suicides" challenge, but that's tangential to the point of this post.

In looking for challenges, I came across a nice, convenient list put together by the ACLU of Oregon (see the right sidebar on this page). In looking through the list a few different challenges caught my eye, but when I went to find information about them it was often hard, if not impossible, to find even a single news article. It seems that often challenges, whether in public libraries or school libraries, just don't make the news.

It's not clear from the ACLU site whether it's challenges list includes only formal written challenge, or whether complaints that are resolved purely verbally are counted too. But in either case, I wouldn't have expected that 18 challenges were made in Oregon public libraries last year - largely because I saw no news about any challenges.

Another oddity in news reporting of challenges that I encountered was that news organizations don't always follow the whole story through to the end. In the case of the Bunny Suicides there were a fairly large number of stories about the initial case, but not as many organizations actually reported about the final decision three months later. (For the record, the book was retained in the library.)