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Government Falsehoods, Democratic Harm, And The Constitution, Helen Norton
Government Falsehoods, Democratic Harm, And The Constitution, Helen Norton
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No abstract provided.
Government Lies And The Press Clause, Helen Norton
Government Lies And The Press Clause, Helen Norton
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This essay considers a particular universe of potentially dangerous governmental falsehoods: the government's lies and misrepresentations about and to the press.
Government's efforts to regulate private speakers' lies clearly implicate the First Amendment, as many (but not all) of our own lies are protected by the Free Speech Clause. But because the government does not have First Amendment rights of its own when it speaks, the constitutional limits, if any, on the government's own lies are considerably less clear.
In earlier work I have explored in some detail the Free Speech and Due Process Clauses as possible constraints on certain …
The Government's Manufacture Of Doubt, Helen Norton
The Government's Manufacture Of Doubt, Helen Norton
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“The manufacture of doubt” refers to a speaker’s strategic efforts to undermine factual assertions that threaten its self-interest. This strategy was perhaps most famously employed by the tobacco industry in its longstanding campaign to contest mounting medical evidence linking cigarettes to a wide range of health risks. At its best, the government’s speech can counter such efforts and protect the public interest, as exemplified by the Surgeon General’s groundbreaking 1964 report on the dangers of tobacco, a report that challenged the industry’s preferred narrative. But the government’s speech is not always so heroic, and governments themselves sometimes seek to manufacture …
Government Speech And The War On Terror, Helen Norton
Government Speech And The War On Terror, Helen Norton
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The government is unique among speakers because of its coercive power, its substantial resources, its privileged access to national security and intelligence information, and its wide variety of expressive roles as commander-in-chief, policymaker, educator, employer, property owner, and more. Precisely because of this power, variety, and ubiquity, the government's speech can both provide great value and inflict great harm to the public. In wartime, more specifically, the government can affirmatively choose to use its voice to inform, inspire, heal, and unite -- or instead to deceive, divide, bully, and silence.
In this essay, I examine the U.S. government's role as …