COMM245 Chapter Notes - Chapter 14: Federal Trade Commission, Seditious Libel, Louis Brandeis
24 Jan 2017
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CH 14 UNDERSTANDING FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
A Brief History of Media Law
The Development of the Philosophy of Free Speech
• Areopagitica = pamphlet by Puritan John Milton in 1644, explaining importance of
free speech
• Freedom to protest was important to members of the Puritans, Protestants and
Roman Catholic church
• Seditious libel laws: laws established in colonial America that made it illegal to
criticize government or its representatives
o How the British exerted their control
• Contempt: willful disobedience of the rules of a court or legislative body
o Reaction to Zenger’s claim that a person should not be punished for
publishing truthful criticism of the government
The First Amendment
• First Amendment: freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition
• Alien and Sedition Acts: 1798, under John Adams, made it illegal to criticize the
government
• 1842: first obscenity law - a customs law forbidding importation of immoral
materials
• Comstock Law = best known obscenity legislation, 1873, banned sex and made it
illegal to send info about birth control or abortion through the mail
• 1800s media law adapted to the print media as it adapted to other aspects of the
Industrial Revolution
o Louis Brandeis objected to publication of gossip and of such info as “the
details of sexual relations”
Defining Limits
• 1917 Espionage Act upheld censorship of ideas considered injurious to the war
effort
• Sedition Act of 1918 made all criticism of President Woodrow Wilson’s
administration illegal
• Supreme Court Justice Holmes - doctrine of clear and present danger -
expression should be punished only when words “are used in such
circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger
that they will bring about substantive evils Congress has a right to prevent”
Regulating Broadcasting
• Equal Opportunity Rule - part of Communications Act of 1934; if a broadcast
station permits one legally qualified candidate for any elective public office to use
it facilities, it must afford an equal opportunity for all other legally qualified
candidates for the same office
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• The Fairness Doctrine - required broadcasters to provide airtime for discussion
of important public issues and to ensure all viewpoints on those issues were
covered
• Ownership limitations - established regulations that limited the power networks
could exert over their affiliates and the # of local stations the networks could own
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Justice Department stepped in often to
stop ads that were false or misleading and fought business monopolies through
antitrust actions
• Deregulation: repeal of government rules and regulations
• Obscenity: offensive content with no social value
o Difficult to define what is obscene, so it meant whatever government
officials believed it to be
• Indecency: offensive content with possible social value (depicts sexual or
excretory activities)
o New category invented for broadcast controls because it is legal for print
media
o Permitted to broadcasting but restricted to hours when children aren’t
expected to be listening or watching
National Security and Prior Restraint
• The press’s role in national security matters was an area of concern
• Supreme Court ruled that in all but the most essential national security cases the
media must be allowed to published; they can be prosecuted after the fact if they
break a law, but they must not be prevented in advance from publishing
Current Trends in Media Law
• Globalization - media organizations need to keep up with libel laws of many
countries, since very few countries have press freedom laws like the First
Amendment
• Concentration of media ownership has actually been encouraged by large legal
settlements b/c only large corporations can afford to pay such settlements or
even defend against them
o Concentration of ownership has also caused many of these large
settlements b/c lawyers can argue that big judgments are necessary to get
the conglomerate’ attention and teach it a lesson
• New laws have had to be written for crimes that didn’t exist before the Internet
like ones against computer hacking
• Older laws like those against the crime of fraud have had to be applied to the
Internet
Understanding Today’s Media Law
Personal Rights
• Privacy
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