Copyright, Free Speech, and the Public's Right to Know: How Journalists Think about Fair Use

This study, resulting from long-form interviews with 80 journalists, finds that journalistic mission is in peril, because of lack of clarity around copyright and fair use. Journalists' professional culture is highly conducive to a robust employment of their free speech rights under the copyright doctrine of fair use, but their actual knowledge of fair use practice is low. Where they have received education on copyright and fair use, it has often been erroneous. Ironically, when they do not know that they are using fair use, they nevertheless do so with a logic and reasoning that accords extremely well with today's courts' interpretation of the law. But when they have to actively make a decision about whether to employ fair use, they often resort to myths and misconceptions. Furthermore, they sometimes take unnecessary risks. The consequence of a failure to understand their free speech issues within the framework of fair use means that, when facing new practices or situations, journalists experience expense, delays and even failure to meet their mission of informing the public. These consequences are avoidable, with better and shared understanding of fair use within the experience of journalistic practice, whether it is original reporting, aggregation, within large institutions or a one-person outfit. Journalists need both to understand fair use and to articulate collectively the principles that govern its employment to meet journalistic mission

Spartan Daily, November 9, 1964

Volume 52, Issue 34https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/4606/thumbnail.jp

Paradox as resistance in male dominated fields and the value of (sur)facing enthymematic narratives

Women working in masculine organizational contexts face a challenge of balancing (1) access to power by co-opting masculine discourse in ways that risk reinforcing it, with (2) challenging and resisting practices that privilege masculinity. In this manuscript, we address one communication strategy for navigating that challenge: The denial/acknowledgment paradox in which women explicitly deny that gender affected their experience, but also describe the many ways it affected their experience. To do so, we examined transcripts of interviews with 11 women candidates who ran in the 2017 Virginia House of Delegates election in the United States and demonstrated this paradoxical communication strategy. Our analysis offers five different structures of the denial/acknowledgment paradox and shows how four of those structures engage what we call an “enthymematic narrative” of victimhood. Ultimately, we argue that (sur) facing the enthymematic narrative amplifies the generative potential of the denial/acknowledgment paradox and suggest that (sur)facing enthymematic narratives should be taken up more broadly as a strategy for organizational and social change