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Full-Text Articles in Law
How We Talk About The Press, Erin C. Carroll
How We Talk About The Press, Erin C. Carroll
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In 2017, the term “fake news” was so popular that it received the “Word of the Year” honor from the American Dialect Society. Since then, its popularity may have abated some, but its use persists. Most obviously, anti-press speakers weaponize the term fake news to undermine journalists and the press as an institution. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, the term is also in regular rotation among many who would seem to support a free and independent press, including scholars, teachers, and journalists themselves.
The continued and often-uncritical use of fake news should worry us. As thinkers across disciplines have recognized for …
News As Surveillance, Erin C. Carroll
News As Surveillance, Erin C. Carroll
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
As inhabitants of the Information Age, we are increasingly aware of the amount and kind of data that technology platforms collect on us. Far less publicized, however, is how much data news organizations collect on us as we read the news online and how they allow third parties to collect that personal data as well. A handful of studies by computer scientists reveal that, as a group, news websites are among the Internet’s worst offenders when it comes to tracking their visitors.
On the one hand, this surveillance is unsurprising. It is capitalism at work. The press’s business model has …
Promoting Journalism As Method, Erin C. Carroll
Promoting Journalism As Method, Erin C. Carroll
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
The marketplace of ideas has been a centerpiece of free speech jurisprudence for a century. According to the marketplace theory, the vigorous competition of ideas, free from government interference, is the surest path to truth. As our metaphorical marketplace has moved online, the competition has never been so heated. We should be drowning in truth. Yet, in reality, truth has perhaps never been more elusive.
As we struggle to promote democratic debate and surface truth in our chaotic networked public sphere, we are understandably drawn to familiar frames and tools. These include the source of the marketplace of ideas theory—the …
Platforms And The Fall Of The Fourth Estate: Looking Beyond The First Amendment To Protect Watchdog Journalism, Erin C. Carroll
Platforms And The Fall Of The Fourth Estate: Looking Beyond The First Amendment To Protect Watchdog Journalism, Erin C. Carroll
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Journalists see the First Amendment as an amulet, and with good reason. It has long protected the Fourth Estate—an independent institutional press—in its exercise of editorial discretion to check government power. This protection helped the Fourth Estate flourish in the second half of the twentieth century and ably perform its constitutional watchdog role.
But in the last two decades, the media ecology has changed. The Fourth Estate has been subsumed by a Networked Press in which journalists are joined by engineers, algorithms, audience, and other human and non-human actors in creating and distributing news. The Networked Press’s most powerful members …