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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Aims Of Public Scholarship In Media Law And Ethics, Erik Ugland
The Aims Of Public Scholarship In Media Law And Ethics, Erik Ugland
Erik Ugland
This essay urges scholars in media law and ethics to reevaluate the extent and utility of their public-scholar efforts and to consider ways that they can transfer research-based knowledge to public audiences while also playing a more deliberate role in holding media and government institutions accountable. It suggests that the devolution of standards in mass communication, the increasing encroachments on media autonomy, and the broader collapse of power into fewer hands make this a particularly urgent moment for scholars to reengage the public and to abandon their feckless neutrality on public issues. The overarching aim of public scholars ought to …
Newsgathering, Autonomy, And The Special-Rights Apocrypha: Supreme Court And Media Litigant Conceptions Of Press Freedom, Erik Ugland
Erik Ugland
This Article addresses the validity of several long-standing assumptions about the Supreme Court’s free-press jurisprudence and about the arguments made by the media litigants in those cases. It analyzes more than three decades of court opinions and litigant briefs and finds, among other things, no support for the abiding accusation that the media litigants have claimed an elite or preferred constitutional position, or that they have sought judicial recognition of a framework of special rights. The litigants did make distinctions between speech and press, and between the press and public, but they linked their claims to an egalitarian conception of …