Does America have a free press? Many who answer yes appeal to First Amendment protections that shield the press from government censorship. But in this comprehensive history of American press freedom as it has existed in theory, law, and practice, Sam Lebovic shows that, on its own, the right of free speech has been insufficient to guarantee a free press.
Lebovic recovers a vision of press freedom, prevalent in the mid-twentieth century, based on the idea of unfettered public access to accurate information. This "right to the news" responded to persistent worries about the quality and diversity of the information circulating in the nation's news. Yet as the meaning of press freedom was contested in various arenasâSupreme Court cases on government censorship, efforts to regulate the corporate newspaper industry, the drafting of state secrecy and freedom of information laws, the unionization of journalists, and the rise of the New JournalismâAmericans chose to define freedom of the press as nothing more than the right to publish without government censorship. The idea of a public right to all the news and information was abandoned, and is today largely forgotten.
Free Speech and Unfree News compels us to reexamine assumptions about what freedom of the press means in a democratic societyâand helps us make better sense of the crises that beset the press in an age of aggressive corporate consolidation in media industries, an increasingly secretive national security state, and the daily newspaper's continued decline.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Prologue: The Problem of Press Freedom
- 1. The Inadequacy of Speech Rights
- 2. Interwar Threats to Press Freedom
- 3. A New Deal for the Corporate Press?
- 4. Dependent Journalists, Independent Journalism?
- 5. The Weapon of Information in the Good War
- 6. The Cold War Dilemma of a Free Press
- 7. The Rise of State Secrecy
- 8. Leaks, Mergers, and Nixonâs Assault on the News
- 9. Sprawling Secrecy and Dying Newsrooms
- Abbreviations
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Index
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Yes, you can access Free Speech and Unfree News by Sam Lebovic in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.