Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Democracy at the Crossroads: Why Ownership Matters
- 2 Not a Real Problem: Many Owners, Many Sources
- 3 Not a Real Problem: The Market or the Internet Will Provide
- 4 The First Amendment Guarantee of a Free Press: An Objection to Regulation?
- 5 Solutions and Responses
- Postscript: Policy Opportunism
- Notes
- Index
- Titles in the series
4 - The First Amendment Guarantee of a Free Press: An Objection to Regulation?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Democracy at the Crossroads: Why Ownership Matters
- 2 Not a Real Problem: Many Owners, Many Sources
- 3 Not a Real Problem: The Market or the Internet Will Provide
- 4 The First Amendment Guarantee of a Free Press: An Objection to Regulation?
- 5 Solutions and Responses
- Postscript: Policy Opportunism
- Notes
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
The democratic reasons for opposing media concentration described in chapter 1 could easily be taken as a summary of First Amendment values. Justice Hugo Black's canonical statement is that “[the First] Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.” Black's statement occurred in a case involving general antitrust law applied to an association of newspapers. In possibly its most famous broadcasting case, the Court relied heavily and repeatedly on Justice Black's opinion, citing it in this media-specific case to justify the Court's central proposition that “[i]t is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount. … [It] is the purpose of the First Amendment to reserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market.” Likewise, in a continuously quoted passage from what many consider our most important First Amendment case, New York Times v. Sullivan, Justice William Brennan read the First Amendment against what he called the “background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” and approvingly invoked Justice Learned Hand's view that the First Amendment “presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Media Concentration and DemocracyWhy Ownership Matters, pp. 124 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006