The first goal of this chapter is to argue that the press as an institution is entitled to special solicitude under the First Amendment, not only because it is textually specified in the Constitution or because it serves important roles such as checking public and private power, but because it can contribute to the marketplace of ideas in ways that a healthy democracy needs. In other words, the press as an institution can provide an important link between the First Amendment’s epistemic and democratic values. The chapter’s second goal is to provide a rough and preliminary sketch of the relationship between press freedom, violence, and public discourse. Some elements seem straightforward enough. Violence and harassment obstruct the press’s function, including its traditional role in constituting and shaping public discourse. Distrust, disinformation, violence, and press degradation exist in a mutually reinforcing ecosystem. And even as violence shapes the media, the media shapes the social conditions, understandings, and practice of violence in return. Journalism, albeit in different ways than legal interpretation, “takes place on a field of pain and death,” to repurpose Robert Cover’s famous phrase – not only in describing it but in making it real. This, it should go without saying, is no excuse for violence against media members. The point is, rather, that a healthy press can be a bulwark not only for knowledge and democracy but against the kinds of private and public violence that threaten both.

One of the Supreme Court’s most significant First Amendment rulings may be in peril. For the past 60 years, the landmark 1964 decision of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and the cases that followed have secured strong First Amendment protections for the press and others who speak on public affairs. Under these cases, public officials and public figures must show that the speaker acted with “actual malice” or “reckless disregard” of the truth in order to win a libel suit. This chapter draws heavily on my book Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023). Scholars and advocates have long celebrated Sullivan as one of the most important Supreme Court rulings for the protection of press freedom. Yet, this history also lays bare the high stakes of losing the First Amendment protections recognized in Sullivan. Prior to the Court’s ruling in Sullivan, government officials and other public figures routinely weaponized libel laws to suppress their critics, particularly members of the press. This chapter uses history to explain how and why Sullivan nearly eliminated those overwhelming threats to the press. If New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and related cases are overruled, libel suits could again become weapons of blatant political suppression.

In the effort to deliver the American press from a “death spiral,” advocates often fall back on describing the press function. It is generally explained as a matter of legal doctrine (what the Supreme Court says the press does) and political theory (that a free press is central to democracy). But advocates should also conceptualize the function as a matter of rhetoric. How advocates describe the press’s work can change the degree to which the public cares about that work. In this era of crisis and distraction, that caring is key to preserving and even reimagining the press. This essay describes how press advocates can use rhetoric as a framework to rename press functions and imagine new ones in service of a dynamic and invigorated press.

There is a conflict in law and in journalism ethics regarding the appropriateness of truthful but scandalous information: What should be published and what should be edited out? In the past, judges routinely gave the press the right to make such determinations and often sided with journalists even in surprising situations in which the privacy of the individual seemed clear. In modern internet times, however, some courts are more willing to side with the privacy of individuals over First Amendment press freedoms – and the case brought by professional wrestler Hulk Hogan against the Gawker website for publishing his sex tape without permission is one example. This chapter uses that scenario to explore the clash between an individual’s privacy rights and the rights of the press to decide what is news.

If the press can claim rights different from those guaranteed to every speaker, it must be because we understand the Press Clause to serve constitutional values different from the freedom of speech clause and because these values require distinct forms of rights for their protection. In this short chapter, I explore four distinct constitutional values that at various times have been claimed to be uniquely served by the press: 1) the value of public discourse, 2) the Meiklejohnian value of distributing information, 3) the checking value, and 4) the value of the public sphere. Each of these values yields a different constitutional definition of the “press,” and each might imply a different array of rights that ought to accrue to the press. Although these values are distinct, the press may simultaneously serve one or more of them.

This chapter explores the newspapers anarchists used to create and disseminate an anarchist Latinidad that was a radical, transnational, anti-capitalist, anticlerical, anti-imperial, and Spanish language-based identity forged initially by US-based migrant anarchists from Spain and Cuba. Using the anarchist press in Florida and New York, anarchists rejected the importance of identifying themselves as “Spanish” or “Cuban” and instead forged a cross-border working-class identity. In creating this identity, anarchists focused on their encounters with US capitalism and republican democracy from 1886 to 1898. Such encounters conditioned their perspectives on what an independent Cuba could look like and what it should avoid. Anarchists also debated whether or not to support the Cuban War for Independence. Was it just another nationalist project that would usher in a new, exploitative ruling elite, or could an independent, non-nationalist anarchist society be constructed? These latter debates began in mid-1891– three and a half years before the mambises launched their uprising against Spanish colonialism.

This chapter examines Stimson’s first months back at the War Department following the Fall of France in June 1940 and how its position within Washington shifted from the margins to the center of US policymaking. It examines the dysfunction and turbulence at the War Department in the years prior to Stimson’s arrival and the specific reforms Stimson made to mitigate this upheaval and ensure the Army was in the rooms where policymaking happened. By focusing on these changes and their application during those intial months, this chapter argues that the War Department turned into a crucial buraucratic, political, and policy operator because Stimson and his inner circle overhauled its organizational structure, fashioned concrete policy objectives, and deliberately worked to influence domestic politics and policymaking. By consciously performing as a political actor, the War Department gained leverage over its bureucratic rivals at the Navy and State Departments and became a consequential policymaking nexus inside the Roosevelt administration and within the US government.

The chapter reviews the scholarly interpretations of abolition that have appeared in the last two decades. One group, influenced by Eric Williams, looks for economic motivations stemming from a decline of the British plantation sector; a second focuses on rebellions by slaves, the chief of which was that in St. Domingue, which gave birth to Haiti in 1802. Some in this category see the slaves freeing themselves. Others argue for long-run changes in public attitudes toward violence within Western Europe, especially England, that occurred in the 150 years after the British established their Caribbean plantations. In the eighteenth century the nascent London press began to report slaves resistance to enslavement both on board slave ships and in Caribbean colonies. These reports became more frequent and more detailed as the century progressed. Other cruelties such as burning at the stake, abandoning children, masters’ right to chastise their servants, and the lords’ power over their serfs (in mainland Europe) either ceased or became less frequently exercised. At the same time awareness of Africans and their forced use in the Americas as represented in the London press greatly increased after 1750. Where “slaves” meant English captives in North Africa at the beginning of the century, by 1800 the term referred to Blacks in the Americas.

This chapter focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department. Between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, IRD operations in the subcontinent peaked. At the time, the Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China. However, cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain’s propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one openly focused on Communist China; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviet Union. Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India. The chapter also recovers the importance of nonaligned nations in the story of Cold War covert propaganda and reveals that India was never a passive player in the propaganda Cold War.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the term “literature” was used broadly to describe any printed text. By the turn of the century, its meaning had narrowed to refer specifically to aesthetic verbal objects with distinctive features of authorship and form. This change was brought on by rapid transformations in print culture. Literature created its readership mainly through periodicals: newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, illustrated weeklies, magazines of mass and high culture. Periodicals were not only the medium for all literary genres but were also key in the professionalization of writers and the making of national literatures. They were a powerful tool to shape the literary imagination of a growing and increasingly more diversified reading public. Through the publication of serialized novels, essays, and reviews, periodicals such as La Nación, Sud-América, and Caras y Caretas were essential to the process of literary autonomy in Argentina. In this chapter the history of this process is outlined and those cases in which developments in print culture framed some of the most significant works of Argentine literature are discussed.

As the cases of the Jesús, Maria, y José and the San Juan Baptista made their way through the High Court of Admiralty, the arguments that would eventually be laid before the Court of Prize Appeal took shape. This chapter examines the arguments made in each case and how they affected Anglo-Spanish negotiations over neutrality. The chapter also focuses on the debates between British and Spanish ministers about the meaning and interpretation of the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1667 which governed Spanish neutral rights. It introduces two key people in Anglo-Spanish negotiations, Felix D’Abreu (Spanish representative in London) and Sir Benjamin Keene (British ambassador to Spain). Both men would be instrumental in shaping the debates on Spanish neutral rights and whether those rights could be protected through decisions handed down by the Court of Prize Appeal.

Explores the ascent of Richard Nixon to the presidency during the Vietnam War era, his presidency, his abuses of presidential power, and the many aspects of the Watergate affair that spawned multiple investigations by prosecutors, Congress, and the press and finally led to Nixon’s resignation to avoid impeachment.

All news is fake news, because all reports are to some extent ‘made up’ by the time they are received by a mediated consumer distanced from the original source. ‘Fake’, from the Latin facere (to make, to do), is a member of the family of making words that includes fact, factory, fashion, artificial, and face. It is ironic that the standard test for whether news is ‘fake’ is to subject it to ‘fact-checking’. Facts themselves are things – artefacts – that we make through artificial processes of Creation and Production. Any ‘fact’ deserving of the name is something established by some process involving human skill and judgment. What matters is not whether news or facts are made up – they always are – but how they are made up and what relation there is between the thing at source and the thing as made up for public reception. Public reception also plays its part in the broadcast of fake news. We therefore need to think in terms of ‘receiver responsibility’, from the case of the journalist who receives the factual grain of a promising story to the editor who publishes journalists’ copy to the online user who re-tweets a tweet.

In mid-1953, Abu Mayanja and Munu Sipalo left to study in Britain and India respectively. Chapter 2 follows them to explain the growing importance of information circulation in this cohort’s anticolonial culture. The opportunities they found for pursuing anticolonial activism in the urban hubs of London and Delhi need to be understood within the framework of the early 1950s (anti-communist) socialist internationalism in Western Europe and newly independent Asian countries, specifically through the Socialist International and Asian Socialist Conference. Young, mobile East and Central Africans were critical to the visions of these organisations and the networks that linked them. But Sipalo’s attempts to run an Africa Bureau and organise a pan-African conference, and Mayanja’s attempts to find a platform in the British press were constrained by experiences of racism, and by the ignorance and skewed priorities of anticolonial sympathisers and patrons. Mayanja’s trip to a Moral Re-Armament ‘multiracial’ spiritual centre in the Swiss Alps epitomised some of the paradoxes of this cohort’s information campaign. Much of this is lost when reading this as a history of students abroad.

What was the relationship between a revolutionary African state and the postcolonial media? This chapter analyses the evolution of the press in Dar es Salaam after independence. By the mid-1970s, Tanzania had just two national daily newspapers, one of which was owned by the party, the other by the state. But this was not the outcome of a teleological slide from an independent to a muzzled media, as liberal Cold War-era conceptions of the ‘freedom of the press’ would have it. This chapter shows how the press became a contested site of socialist politics in Dar es Salaam’s internationalised media world. Stakeholders debated questions of who should own newspapers, who should work for them, and what they should write in them. Even when the government nationalised the country’s only independent English-language newspaper, it placed it under the control of a radical, foreign editor and emphasised the need for it to serve as a critical voice. However, when this editorial independence transgressed Tanzania’s foreign policy, the state moved to bring the press under closer control, justified by Third World trends towards ‘development media’.

Molière’s extraordinary success between 1659 and 1673 was due not only to his virtuosity as a dramatist, his comic talent or his exploitation of current affairs; it was due also to his feeling for an ‘event’ and his ability to capture attention. This contribution studies his unprecedented investment in publicity, which mobilised a multitude of forms and mediums, as well as its reliance on a network of agents with varied motivations. Literary history has long tried to distinguish between Molière’s friends and enemies by relying on their praise or criticism of him. This contribution studies them rather as agents who, depending on the context, opportunity and their own interests, sometimes acted for and sometimes against Molière, without this indicating either personal enmity or ties of affection.