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First Amendment

University of Washington School of Law

1981

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The Deceptive 'Right To Know': How Pessimism Rewrote The First Amendment, Gerald J. Baldasty, Roger A. Simpson Jul 1981

The Deceptive 'Right To Know': How Pessimism Rewrote The First Amendment, Gerald J. Baldasty, Roger A. Simpson

Washington Law Review

In the decade of the 1940's, 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's, 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' confidence in the mettle of the American citizenry. By the mid-1960's, 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 …