Cartoonist Grant Goebel, whose Muhammad comic strip touched off tensions in March at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, complained that his First Amendment rights were violated by the college’s newspaper editors, who refused to publish his work.

But experts disagree. Unlike the government, editors can’t be held liable for rejecting any material for any reason, including fear of controversy, experts said. They are the gatekeepers of their publications.

“Journalistically, an editor has the power to decide what to publish and what not to publish,” said Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. “This can be for any number of reasons: quality of the work, taste, to avoid controversy, to invite controversy, to avoid a lawsuit, etc.”

The ultimate decision to not publish Goebel’s comic strip polarized the newsroom of City College News, MCTC’s student newspaper. Two editors threatened to quit if the comic was published — a move that prompted the editor-in-chief, who originally favored to print the comic, to call it off.

Newsrooms around the country battle over similar issues everyday, said Mark Goodman, director of Student Press Law Center, a Virginia-based nonprofit organization that offers free legal assistance to student journalists.

“Historically, college newspapers were willing to push the limits of free speech,” he said. “But there hasn’t been an easy answer to questions about the limits of freedom of expression.”

Professor Kirtley argues that “offensive speech is what the First Amendment is for.  “Speech everyone agrees with needs no constitutional provision to protect it.”

However, Goodman said it’s “unusual for a top editor to refrain from publishing material deemed controversial to avoid the resignation of colleagues” a point that also didn’t resonate well with CCN’s online editor, Chris Greising.

But Goodman said although more speech is always better than less, the CCN editor-in-chief may have feared that the news value of the comic strip would be overshadowed by its potentially explosive message.

Kirtley doesn’t buy that. She disagreed with most American newspapers who didn’t publish the controversial Danish cartoons last year.

“I believe that [the Danish cartoons] were newsworthy and of public interest because of the controversy surrounding them,” she said.