The Deceptive \u27Right to Know\u27: How Pessimism Rewrote the First Amendment

In the decade of the 1940\u27s, particularly in the years just after World War II, freedom of the press, which had been newly elevated and protected by the Supreme Court in the 1930\u27s, began to suffer the corrosive effects of doubt about the strength of the American political system. Among the devastations of war was the failure of the intellectuals\u27 confidence in the mettle of the American citizenry. By the mid-1960\u27s, one consequence was clear: The first amendment no longer meant that the American press was expected to speak freely; it had begun to mean that much of what the press said had to be responsive to assumptions about those who might receive the communication. The idea of a public right to know had begun to undermine the solid foundations of press freedom. Since 1964, the Court has elevated the idea of a right to know to such an extent that the traditional imperative of a right to speak, developed so extensively by the Supreme Court in the 1930\u27s, can no longer be confidently assumed. Hollow rights have been advanced on behalf of consumers to justify governmental controls on press content. This article shows the origins of this wrongheaded theory of the first amendment in the intellectual ferment of the years immediately after World War II. It examines the evolution of Court thinking in three areas of press law: libel, broadcast regulation, and commercial speech

The argument of the broken pane: Suffragette consumerism and newspapers

Within the cut-throat world of newspaper advertising the newspapers of Britain's Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) Votes for Women and the Suffragette managed to achieve a balance that has often proved to be an impossible challenge for social movement press—namely the maintenance of a highly political stance whilst simultaneously exploiting the market system with advertising and merchandising. When the militant papers advocated window smashing of West End stores in 1912–1913, the companies who were the target still took advertisements. Why? What was the relationship between news values, militant violence and advertising income? ‘Do-it-yourself’ journalism operated within a context of ethical consumerism and promotionally orientated militancy. This resulted in newspaper connections between politics, commerce and a distinct market profile, evident in the customisation of advertising, retailer dialogue with militants and longer-term loyalty—symptomatic of a wider trend towards newspaper commercialism during this period