Newspapers and Freedom of Expression
The South Carolina journalist and libertarian, John Lofton (1919-1990), argued persuasively that American newspapers champion First Amendment values “based more on self interest than on principle.” In other words, strange as it seems, our newspapers fight for freedom of expression mostly when it helps one of their own (for example, in the Pentagon Papers case). And especially so, during conflicts between (a) perceived aggression against national security and (b) the freedoms espoused by the First Amendment. As the progressive U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, no less, declared: “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that … no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.”
Why do these two arguments enthuse me about the need for participatory journalism? About the need to deinstitutionalize, at various planes, the systems of news production and delivery? To protect competition not just in circulation/advertising markets but more directly in news production and delivery? To take reporting “into the community”?
Why do these arguments explain why we are yet to see a vigorous debate about the practice of “embedded reporting” that the American public has had to rely on during the Iraq war?
And as you chew over that, check out this rather caustic commentary by Robert Fisk of the Independent.
