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Editor's note: This story was updated Feb. 9 at 11:10 a.m. to reflect new information.
Charges were dropped against two Northwestern University students who faced criminal charges in connection to a newspaper they created to parody The Daily Northwestern, the university’s independent student newspaper, NBC reported.
The parody front page, titled The Northwestern Daily, was placed over the covers of “hundreds” of copies of the real student paper on Oct. 23, according to an article in The Daily Northwestern days later. It included a headline that criticized the university for being “complicit in genocide of Palestinians,” alongside a fake ad for Birthright Israel, an organization that takes young people with Jewish heritage on trips to Israel.
The parent company of The Daily Northwestern, Students Publishing Company, reported the fake front page to law enforcement. The two students who produced the parody, both of whom are Black, were charged with theft of advertising services. The obscure statute, which was originally created to dissuade the Ku Klux Klan from distributing recruitment materials in newspapers, comes with a maximum sentence of a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
The charges caused outrage around campus. More than 6,000 individuals signed a petition decrying the Northwestern University police department’s handling of the situation; even The Daily Northwestern’s editorial board called on its publishers to ask for the case to be dropped.
