Law Commons^™

Tomorrow’S Wars And The Media, Alexander G. Lovelace

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

Distilling lessons from the author’s book, The Media Offensive: How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy during World War II, this article provides applicable suggestions for the US military today. As in World War II, the press is both a weapon and a possible vulnerability in modern warfare. Consequently, this article offers practical suggestions for how the press can be used by public affairs officers, commanders, and policymakers to achieve victory in coming conflicts.

The Public Benefits Of Press Specialness, Ronnell Andersen Jones

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In many circumstances, a broad umbrella of shared rights for the press and the public is perfectly adequate. But there are also times when statutorily, and even constitutionally, we should be providing unique protection to those who, if granted rights beyond those available to all speakers, will use those rights to benefit society as a whole. In these areas, our ongoing refusal to conceptualize and legally recognize the specialness of the press function has robbed us of public benefits.

The Freedom of Information Act context is a perfect illustration of this. Federal agencies are so swamped by requesters with non-newsworthy, …

The Disappearing Freedom Of The Press, Ronnell Andersen Jones

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

At this moment of unprecedented decline of local news and amplified attacks on the American press, attention is turning to the protection the Constitution might provide to journalism and the journalistic function. New signals that at least some Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court might be willing to rethink the core press-protecting precedent in New York Times v. Sullivan has intensified these conversations. But this scholarly dialogue appears to be taking place against a mistaken foundational assumption: that the U.S. Supreme Court continues to articulate and embrace at least some notion of freedom of the press. Despite the First Amendment …

“Officer-Involved Shootings”: How The Exonerative Tense Of Media Accounts Distorts Reality, Michael Conklin

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

In “Officer-Involved Shootings”: How the Exonerative Tense of Media Accounts Distorts Reality, the author examines how the use of passive language absolves officers from public and media accountability after a shooting. This Article reports the findings of a first-of-its-kind study designed to measure how the use of the phrase “officer-involved shooting” affects public perceptions of police behavior justifications.

À La Carte Cable: A Regulatory Solution To The Misinformation Subsidy, Christopher R. Terry, Eliezer J. Silberberg, Stephen Schmitz, John Stack, Eve Sando

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Although “fake news” is as old as mass media itself, concerns over disinformation have reached a fever pitch in our current media environment. Online media outlets’ heavy reliance on user-generated content has altered the traditional gatekeeping functions and professional standards associated with traditional news organizations. The idea of objectivity-focused informational content has primarily been substituted for a realist acceptance of the power and popularity of opinion-driven “news.” This shift is starkly visible now: mainstream news media outlets knowingly spread hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and the like.

This current state of affairs is not some freak accident. The Supreme Court’s First Amendment …

Platform-Enabled Crimes: Pluralizing Accountability When Social Media Companies Enable Perpetrators To Commit Atrocities, Rebecca Hamilton

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Online intermediaries are omnipresent. Each day across the globe, the corporations running these platforms execute policies and practices that serve their profit model, typically by sustaining user engagement. Sometimes, these seemingly banal business activities enable principal perpetrators to commit crimes. Online intermediaries, however, are almost never held to account for their complicity in the resulting harms. This Article introduces the concept of platformenabled crimes into the legal literature to highlight the ways in which the ordinary business activities of online intermediaries enable the commission of crime. It then focuses on a subset of platform-enabled crimes—those in which a social media …

The U.S. Supreme Court's Characterizations Of The Press: An Empirical Study, Sonja R. West, Ronnell Anderson Jones

Scholarly Works

The erosion of constitutional norms in the United States is at the center of an urgent national debate. Among the most crucial of these issues is the fragile and deteriorating relationship between the press and the government. While scholars have responded with sophisticated examinations of the President’s and legislators’ characterizations of the news media, one branch of government has
received little scrutiny—the U.S. Supreme Court. This gap in the scholarship is remarkable in light of the Court’s role as the very institution entrusted with safeguarding the rights of the press. This Article presents the findings of the first comprehensive empirical …

The Disappearing Freedom Of The Press, Sonja R. West, Ronnell Anderson Jones

Scholarly Works

At this moment of unprecedented decline of local news and amplified attacks on the American press, attention is turning to the protection the Constitution might provide to journalism and the journalistic function. New signals that at least some Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court might be willing to rethink the core press-protecting precedent in New York Times v. Sullivan has intensified these conversations. But this scholarly dialogue appears to be taking place against a mistaken foundational assumption: that the U.S. Supreme Court continues to articulate and embrace at least some notion of freedom of the press. Despite the First Amendment …

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

A Free Press Without Democracy, Erin C. Carroll

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For several decades, the American press has been fighting for its economic survival. But while it has been consumed with this effort, the political threat to a free press has grown perhaps greater than the economic one. Democracy is eroding globally, including in the United States. Given the importance of a free press to democracy, the press needs to more urgently consider how it maintains its freedom as erosion persists.

This Article sets out a framework for American press priorities in this pivotal moment. It suggests that to resist and weather a turn to autocracy, the press must endeavor to …

News Treatment Of The Supreme Court: Language Selection, Ideological Directions, And Public Support, Alexander Denison

Theses and Dissertations--Political Science

In an increasingly diverse media landscape, how much of the ideological trends seen in current news reporting affect coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court? This work examines two different aspects of the Court's activities, their decisions and the confirmation hearings of Court nominees, analyzing what factors, if any, lead to differences in coverage language. Finally, through the use of a survey experiment, I analyze whether these differences in language, in combination with positive symbolic imagery, affect attitudes toward the institution. This work provides a novel consideration of whether the Court is subject to the same ideological slant found in coverage …