Cable Television And The First Amendment

In our age of media revolutions, Patrick M. Garry offers guidelines for constitutionally redefining the press, and maintains that the First Amendment press clause must broaden the scope of its freedoms to include the communication activities of a much larger public.

No liberty is more vulnerable to the vagaries of the current political climate than freedom of the press.

Broadcasters, parents, public officials, and teachers have all abandoned our children to a wasteland of vacuous, often violent television programing. In this eloquent book, Newton Minow and Craig LaMay persuasively demonstrate that this is a false application of the First Amendment. Broadcasters are required by law to serve the public interest, and the Supreme Court and Congress have said that service to children is a broadcaster's obligation under law, they remind us; the First Amendment can be used on behalf of children, to help make television a force that will nurture and not harm them.

Suggesting future lines of inquiry for policymakers and others, this report attempts to distill the essential points of discussion and debate that occurred during a conference on electronic media regulation and the first amendment attended by 21 experts representing legislative, regulatory, business, judicial, academic, audience, and media interests. Sections of the report discuss: coping with the "paradigm" shift in communications; the old paradigms and how they work; broadcasting and scarcity: the Geller critique; reactions to Geller and alternative paradigms; the hybrid first amendment rights of cable television; is common carriage incompatible with the first amendment?; proposed theories of the first amendment in the era of electronic media; reactions to the 10 theories of the first amendment; and the question whether a single theory of the first amendment can embrace both print and electronic media? A partial list of referenced cases, a list of conference participants, and the Program on Communications and Society policy statement are attached. (RS)

Detailed examination of the law of mass media, providing principle cases, court opinions, and extensive text and research materials. Includes in-depth chapter discussions of: The American Legal System; Introduction to Freedom of Expression; Defamation; Privacy; Liability for More...Emotional and Physical Harm; Copyright and Trademark; National Security; Obscenity; Advertising Regulation; Press Coverage of the Administration of Justice; Confidentiality in Newsgathering; Newsgathering from non-Judicial Public Sources; Ownership of the Media and Related Problems; Acces to the Media; Introduction to Broadcasting; Legal Control of Broadcast Programming: Political Speech; Legal Control of Broadcast Programming: Nonpolitical Speech; and Cable and New Technologies.