Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America by Sam Lebovic (review)

In 1945 Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, recruited New York Times science writer William Laurence to carry the news of the atomic bombing of Japan to the American people. Laurence was given unique access to the secret mission, and in return he wrote a series of stories for the Times praising the scientific genius of the project, playing down reports of radiation poisoning, and emphasizing the military necessity and moral righteousness of the attack. For this reporting, Laurence was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 2006 New York Times reporter James Risen published a book based on leaked documents that revealed a failed CIA operation in Iran. (The Times had withheld the story.) In an effort to trace the leaker, the Justice Department subpoenaed Risen, hounded him for years, and threatened him with imprisonment. He refused to reveal his source. Eventually the leaker was exposed and found guilty of violating the Espionage Act. For this reporting, Risen was given the Elijah Lovejoy Award. The leaker was given a prison sentence.

These episodes suggest two standard models of national public-affairs journalism in America: cooptation and intimidation. How a so-called free press came to work this way is the subject of Sam Lebovic's excellent book, Free Speech and Unfree News. Lebovic's thesis is a historical one: as the news media gradually gained the right to publish almost anything, their access to public affairs information and their economic incentive to gather and publish it declined. This is the paradox of the book's subtitle. In law and policy and in media business ideology, freedom of the press became synonymous with the individual right of free expression, while the right of the public to receive information vital for self-government was lost in the consolidation of media market power and the growth of government secrecy. "Over the course of the twentieth century," Lebovic writes, "Americans prioritized their right to speech, not their right to news" (249).

Though the main concern of the book is the twentieth century, Lebovic's story begins much earlier. The idea of freedom of the press developed alongside liberal ideas about laissez-faire and free trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But market liberalism grew within "a cocoon of republican values" (14). Political theorists from John Milton to John Stuart Mill imagined press freedom as an unfettered marketplace of ideas, but from that marketplace they expected truth and public virtue to emerge. Because the common good was the goal, freedom of the press was always shaped by government subsidy and regulation. Actual laissez-faire did not exist. In other words, two distinct values—market liberalism and the common good—defined the idea of freedom of the press. Whether they were mutually reinforcing or contradictory was the key question for twentieth-century Americans.

In the realm of constitutional law and media corporate ideology, the free market idea ("classical liberalism") caught on just as it was beginning to seem obsolete to early twentieth-century progressives, who embraced a new "social liberalism." They feared the concentration of private economic power, including media power, more than the power of government. As large newspapers and newspaper chains gained oligopolistic market power, their owners lobbied against any government interference in their industry. And the Supreme Court and Congress complied. New Deal efforts to rein in corporate media power in the name of the common good were defeated during World War II and the Cold War era. By the 1960s, "while the press had new rights to act according to its own self-interest in matters of both business and expression," Lebovic writes, "public rights to access information remained unprotected in law, and faced ongoing challenges of accelerating press consolidation and entrenched state secrecy" (191).

Lebovic's book belongs to a growing field of scholarship that examines capitalism as a historical construction, a product of law, policy, and institutions, not...