![]() Newspapers were therefore increasingly owned by wealthy publishers and, as advertising revenues flowed to the most successful papers, smaller newspapers were forced to close.Īs a result, by the first decades of the twentieth century the newspaper industry had begun a period of consolidation that has continued into the present. ![]() But to reach as many readers as possible, they required massive investments in production and distribution infrastructure. Because they were appealing to advertisers, these newspapers had the potential to be highly profitable. By the first decades of the twentieth century, a newspaper industry had emerged, dominated by mass, urban newspapers with vast circulations. Over the next century, however, technological and economic developments transformed the press. When the First Amendment was written in the late-eighteenth century, the printing press did not radically differ from Gutenberg’s, invented centuries earlier. In so doing, we can find a better guide to the problems that confront American press freedom today. But if we look beyond the courts to broader political and intellectual debates about press freedom, we can find both more expansive understandings of the right to a free press and a more complex story about the rise of the modern First Amendment. These topics rarely make it into our histories of press freedom, which remain focused primarily on First Amendment jurisprudence as developed by the Supreme Court. In this article, I want to look at the way that mid-century press reformers sought to mitigate two new problems that remain with us today: corporate consolidation in the news industry and the rise of state secrecy. They continued to argue that a more democratic press required not only freedom of expression but also a commitment to what some called “freedom of the news.” But many other Americans in the twentieth century, as concerned about the “stream of news” as Lippmann, responded to crises in the press not by scaling back their belief in the First Amendment but by expanding it. By 1926 he was arguing that the “public must be put in its place…so that each of us may live free of the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd.” We can see early signs of a similar political trajectory in contemporary fears about fake news and suggestions that it might be possible to regulate away misinformation. Everything else depends on it.” Īs he wrestled with this difficult problem over coming years, the increasingly conservative Lippmann would come to scale back his commitments to democracy, free speech, and the potential of public opinion. “Protection of the sources of its opinion,” Lippmann soon insisted, “is the basic problem of democracy. In fact, Lippmann thought that protecting rights to free opinion and expression were less important than protecting what he called the “stream of news” upon which opinions were based. United States dissent only weeks earlier-Lippmann already thought that the right to publish without state interference was inadequate to confront the problems of the modern press. In passages that sound familiar today, he worried about the rise of a “pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses” and bemoaned how easily the news spread the “contagion of unreason.” And even though the First Amendment was just beginning its meteoric twentieth-century rise-Oliver Wendell Holmes had outlined the modern vision of free speech in his Abrams v. In 1919, in a series of articles in the Atlantic, he cast a cynical eye over the sensationalist headlines of the commercial press and the rise of wartime censorship and propaganda. Americans are taking a closer look at the free press they have long lionized, and they do not particularly like what they see.Īlmost a hundred years ago, a young Walter Lippmann was similarly disillusioned with the nation’s press. And since the 2016 elections, fears about fake news have proliferated. Meanwhile, the news media has struggled to report on the activities of the secretive security state during the War on Terror-when inside sources share such information, they risk prosecution for illegal leaking. With advertising revenues collapsing, newspapers have been forced to lay off staff, if not close their doors. The “mainstream media” is a regular whipping boy in populist political rhetoric. As a result, First Amendment rights are more protected today than at any time in American history. For decades, a broad political consensus had presumed that a press free from government interference was the sine qua non of democratic liberty a stronger First Amendment would mean a stronger democracy. In recent years, the relationship between First Amendment rights and American democracy has become unsettled. Courtesy Library of Congress The Inadequacy of American Press Freedom Sam Lebovic
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