For my Ethics and Mass Communications class I had to write two essays for a midterm. I did so well that I thought I'd share them with the Internet. This is the first of the two. The question posed was whether freedom of the press should be limited. This paper is written in AP style, so if you're wondering why the paragraphs are so short, that's why.
Leanne Fuller
Midterm Essay
Question 2
2 March 2011
In recent years, people have suggested that the freedom guaranteed to the press by the First Amendment is too broad.
In 2006, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich proposed in a speech that freedom of speech should be curtailed in order to fight terrorism.
According to MSNBC, his focus was mainly on the Internet:
“Gingrich […] said Monday [November 27] that a ‘different set of rules’ may be needed to reduce the terrorists’ ability to use the Internet to recruit and communicate.”
He said this at a dinner held in honor of crusaders for the First Amendment.
During the 2008 presidential election vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin famously claimed that the media was violating her right to freedom of speech by suggesting that she was running attack ads against Barack Obama – a bit of circular logic that still baffles many.
These two instances are representative of the two main arguments against freedom of the press: the argument that it is a danger to homeland security, and the argument that too much freedom allows for unfair reporting.
To expound, some people think freedom of the press endangers the public because enemies of the United States might be able to see information published in the press, online and on TV.
This is not a far cry from the old concept of seditious libel in English common law.
It held that any written statement that “brings [the government] into hatred or contempt,” regardless of the truth of the statement, is a criminal offense.
The justification used for seditious libel law was that negative public opinion of the king would make him unpopular and incite unrest, making England weak.
Some people were sentenced to life in prison for this offense. Others were just branded on the face and sent home as a kind of warning.
The principal behind the two ideas is the same: that security of the country is more important than the rights of individuals to access information.
This brings to mind the words of Benjamin Franklin:
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
And for that matter, liberty affords safety as well, and relinquishing liberty relinquishes that safety.
Indeed when we give up the freedom of the press to report on government activity, we open ourselves up to exploitation and control by the government.
We also give up quality of the press. We give up truth.
When we give up truth we may as well not have journalism. We can just establish an Orwellian Ministry of Truth and be done with it.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. But at least the terrorists won’t get us.
Palin’s argument that the press exploits its freedom is equally unacceptable – more so when you consider that her problem with the press is that their reporting of her ads made her look bad.
Others have said that freedom of the press allows the press to be “unfair” or “irresponsible,” and so freedom of the press should be limited to curtail this.
Concerning this issue of fairness: Who ever said the truth was fair?
To quote the writer Aldous Huxley, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”
Looking more closely at the Palin example, Palin and John McCain did run negative ads, which are also called attack ads, about Obama.
The truth didn’t favor Palin in this instance, but that doesn’t mean that reporting it is somehow unfair or biased.
In fact, it would have been unfair to readers if journalists had refrained from reporting it just because it might hurt Palin’s image.
The responsibility of the press is not to individual politicians, or to the government at large. Its responsibility is to its readers.
And if the press hadn’t reported on Palin’s ads, the readers might have been cheated out of information. They would have been cheated out of the truth.
And then there exists the idea that reporting certain things is irresponsible and so the press should be limited in reporting those things.
To the extent that reporting certain things is irresponsible, this is true.
It is irresponsible to report unverified or unproven information.
It is irresponsible to release information that could lead to deaths of many innocent people (such as leaked information about the modus operandi of a serial killer that may help the killer avoid police because he/she then knows what police are looking for).
This does not, however, justify the abridging of First Amendment rights. These instances must be dealt with on a case by case basis at the discretion of the journalists reporting them.
A blanket policy is seldom a wise choice when dealing with ethics, and to leave censorship of this sort up to the government is to tie the hands of the press.
Who would decide which topics journalists are allowed to cover? What is off limits? Are there separate rules for all the different news media, or do we apply the same standards to visual and print media?
It seems unlikely that journalists themselves could make these decisions for all situations for all of time in journalism, let alone government officials.
It was the absurdist author Albert Camus who said “A free press can be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom a press will never be anything but bad.”
Looking at countries that have had government-regulated press, it is clear that Camus was right.
In England before the mid-nineteenth century, seditious libel laws made the arrest of printers commonplace.
The people weren’t likely to get accurate information about their rulers because those who might tell them were afraid for their lives and livelihoods.
In Nazi Germany the government controlled the press, and effectively there was no press, only propaganda.
Journalists constantly deal with the struggle between the public’s right to know and issues like the rights of individuals to privacy and national security, etc.
They deal with these issues independently, story by story, because life is complicated and no two news stories are the same.
Do journalists make mistakes sometimes? Yes. Have lines of ethics been crossed before? Undoubtedly.
But that doesn’t mean that government controls will make the press better. Heed the words of a man who knew both the importance of the press and the sting of its scrutiny.
“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” – Thomas Jefferson
