The U.S. First Amendment embraces five rights that a “person,” not a U.S. Citizen, who is living in the U.S. territory should exercise the rights to freely express, publish, assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Last Saturday, I visited Washington D.C. to attend the “Free Speech on Campus” journalism conference by the Newseum Instititute and the Knight Foundation.

There, 45 aspiring journalists of diverse backgrounds shared their perspectives on how to protect the First Amendment rights and how to facilitate the notion of “Market place of ideas” on college campus.

Facilitating the notion of “Market place of ideas” on college campus may not be easy to achieve within a short amount of time. In fact, that notion may have already been taken for granted in our daily lives — in that the U.S. Founding Fathers had emphasized the right to freely express ideas when devising the very First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in 1791.

But has it been?

In other words, could we all assert that our right to freely express has been secured for most of the time, since 1791, under the protection of the First Amendment?

I can’t say “yes” for sure to that question, and neither can you. But I know who would especially be responsible for protecting the First Amendment rights on behalf of the people.

Journalists.

Journalists write stories. They write stories to benefit the people with information. And they write stories essentially to be representatives of the people against the powerful.

The First Amendment, unlike the Fourteenth Amendment which says about U.S. citizens on its verses, underscores the word “people” in the U.S.

It says: “Congress shall make no law respecting … prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech … the right of the people.”

The “people” living in the U.S. isn’t restricted to the U.S. citizens. It could also be the people without U.S. citizenship. That suggests journalists do have a duty to write stories which give everyone, regardless of one’s citizenship, a chance to speak out one’s voice — if they want to foster the First Amendment rights through their stories.

However, there was a case in which journalists seem to forget about that duty.

In fall 2015, the University of Missouri, the home of the first journalism school in the world, suffered a racial uprising. The Concerned Student 1950, an MU black students coalition, was protesting a climate of racism and discrimination on campus by holding days-long campout on the Mel Carnahan Quadrangle.

The Columbia Missourian, an independent local newspaper, first reported the protest. Because the protest was driven by racism on black students, the Missourian primarily published stories about racism and discrimination on black students, alone.

But the local newspaper didn’t publish a single story about racism on other races, like Asians — who were mostly international students, or non-U.S. citizens.

That left me, who was a Missourian reporter at the time, with one question: What about other minority groups, who could have suffered racism on campus just like the black students had?

Thus I embarked on random interviews with hundreds of international students and asked each of them whether they had suffered racism on campus.

After several months of shedding much bloods and tears while reporting, the story  “MU’s Asian students reluctant to report episodes of discrimination, racism”  ran online on Feburary 3, 2016, and pushed the University of Missouri officials to open a wider door for international students to voice their concerns.

I hope my little anecdote would send an alert to some journalists who are tailing after the powerful, not the people, for stories at this moment.

Plus, if you are reading this little note and you happen to be a reporter at somewhere on the globe, I would much encourage you to remind yourself of this very question:

“How could I foster the First Amendment rights through my stories?”