Here is my final paper for PS320. Chop it up guys. I'm going for the A. I need all the feedback I can get.



The First Amendment and Suppression Thereof
There are few American institutions that have the broad powers of the press. It controls information. The press can present information that sheds light on illegal actions, change the tone of a national debate, and control what its observers think. Of course, this sounds like a lot of power for an institution that is not a part of the government. Journalists are not elected. They are not appointed by the President or approved by Congress, but they can make or break a presidency. They can force a congressman and senators into resignation. They have broad discretionary powers that can shape foreign and domestic policy. Should an unregulated entity have so much power? According to the Constitution, it should. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”(The Constitution of the United States of America 26). These words are powerful and state a clear meaning. The framers were right. The power of the press is in place for a reason, but it should be wielded responsibly.
The freedom of the press is still a rather young concept, considering the age of humanity. The idea has evolved little by little since the sixteenth century. It culminated in 1791 with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment gives the press total freedom over information. For the purposes of this paper, I will stick with the historical outlook of western civilization.
Historically, information has been suppressed, by both church and state. The church, meaning the Roman Catholic Church, has always had a fear of information. They have a habit of suppressing anything that contradicts their teachings. The Bible speaks of tolerance, yet the Catholic Church has always been completely intolerant of the views of others. During the Inquisition of the Church, the Catholic Church actually executed people for teaching, what they considered heresy. The consensus among church scholars is that thirty-two thousand people died by the hands of the church during the inquisition. These people were tortured to death for having a different opinion of the world than that of the church. The church has been less violent, but just as sadistic with the modern press. The persecution of Galileo Galilei comes to mind when speaking of suppression by the church. The Book of Psalms says, "He set the Earth on its foundations; it can never be moved"(Holy Bible 471). This bible verse is solely responsible for the slowing of the advancement of science. The church used this verse as evidence against Galileo’s studies of astronomy. Galileo argued that the earth revolves around the sun. The position of the church was that stated in the Book of Psalms. Galileo was charged with heresy for teaching his theory and brought to Rome for trial. At seventy years old, Galileo was subjected to threats of torture by the church. He was taken to the dungeons, under the Vatican, and shown the instruments of torture that the church was known for. Galileo was afraid of being tortured and recanted his teachings. For his cooperation, Galileo was confined to his home for the last seven years of his life. He was not allowed to receive visitors or leave his home, until his death.
Suppressing the press was a hobby of monarchs for centuries. The better recordings of press suppression come out of Imperial Britain. The struggle for a free press began in Britain. The publication of unauthorized anti-religious materials resulted in the King of England issuing a royal proclamation requiring a publishing license. This license gave the King the power to control all publication. Anything that was printed without a license was shut down or destroyed without delay. Later English monarchs placed stronger restrictions on publication, but applied them more too political criticism than religious heresy. In 1644, John Milton attacked these publication laws and called on the British Parliament to delay suppressing offensive publications after they appear, rather than advocating prior restraint. Milton’s arguments before Parliament became the cornerstone of the press freedom movement. Though Milton made a huge impact in the establishment of a free press, Parliament did not rescind licensing and censorship laws until 1695.
In the American colonies, the people were already enjoying a free press and quickly building a tradition around it. The colonies formed an organization of news exchange called the Committees of Correspondence. “Despite the absence of powerful national newspapers during the early years of the republic, the press found much more ready acceptance in covering the business of the American Congress than was the case with British Parliament” (Cater 49). These committees quickly formed into newsletters and newspapers that circulated the entirety of the colonies. It did not take long for the press suppression in England to bleed into the colonies. A journalist by the name of John Peter Zenger was the publisher of the New York Weekly Journal. The Journal was an opposition to the Royal Governor’s administration. The governor had Zenger arrested on charges of libel and Zenger was imprisoned in 1734. During his trial in 1735, his defense attorney successfully argued that libel could not be established on the basis of proven fact. If the statements that were charged were true, then libel could not be claimed. This celebrated trial established an indestructible freedom of the press in America.
Zenger’s trial is often seen as the cornerstone of American press freedom. After the American Revolution, several states wrote press freedom clauses into their state constitutions. In 1791, the U.S. Constitution was amended to include a Bill of Rights, which included a provision for freedom of the press. It is a matter of debate whether this amendment was intended to prohibit prosecution for seditious libel or merely to prohibit prior restraint has been a matter of controversy.
When countries go to war, everyone feels the impact. The press is no exception. Irresponsible reporting by journalists during the Civil War led military commanders, on both sides, to appeal to the publishers. They begged the publishers to voluntarily suppress news stories that were of strategic importance to the war. These pleas fell upon silent ears and the military was forced to impose restrictions on the press. They kept journalists out of battle zones and away from the action as much as possible. They also limited access to general staff and the President.
During World War I, the American public was in a near hysterical state over the possibility of sabotage. Congress, in their infinite wisdom, decided to pass the Sedition Act in 1918. This jewel of legislature was possibly the dumbest piece of paper to be made into law, ever. This act made it a federal crime to criticize the federal government or the U.S. Constitution. These acts were used to exercise censorship against pro-German publications. The government also exercised censorship against German language publications and those advocating socialism and pacifism. Kate Richards O’Hare was imprisoned for five years for making an anti-war speech in North Dakota. To further tarnish her reputation, the government coined the nickname “Red Kate.”
The most famous case of this law being enacted was US vs. Eugene V. Debs. Debs was a socialist that unsuccessfully ran for president on the Socialist ticket, on several occasions. He was very anti-war, but still became somewhat popular. In his last election he won more than one million votes. He gave a speech, targeting young men, to rethink enlisting in the Army. For the heinous crime of passing information to future soldiers, Debs was fined and punished to ten years in federal prison. His sentence was commuted to time served by President Warren Harding in 1921. The law which he was convicted under was repealed by Congress that same year.
Advancements in technology have changed the face of the press forever. It has turned news into a twenty-four hour barrage of information. In Freeing the First Amendment, David Allen writes, “Technological change is forcing us to reconsider the First Amendment” (Allen et al. 169). Since 1921, the U.S. government has made few attempts to suppress freedom of the press. The U.S. government went as far as placing journalists with military units in the recent invasion of Iraq. The press was given a free hand to report what as going on within these units and did a very good job of presenting the invasion news objectively. In one instance, Geraldo Rivera reported U.S. troop positions and strategy on Fox news. In a hyper real news world this type of behavior could cause a huge dilemma. This stirred a storm of controversy, but Rivera was not punished or suppress in anyway. The U.S. military simply asked that he not do that anymore and he complied. This could have been a move that undermined the Army’s strategy in that region, but the Army respected the first amendment and complied with it.
A case where the press abused their freedom is the Danish cartoon controversy. In September of two-thousand and five, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, images of the prophet Muhammad were drawn in a political cartoon. According to Islamic belief, any depiction of Muhammad is considered blasphemous. The fact that these cartoons were printed caused Danish Muslim organizations to protest. In some cases, these protests turn violent. This didn’t end in Denmark though. As this controversy inflamed, so did the media coverage of these cartoons. The fact that the cartoons were reprinted in over fifty different countries led to global protests. Critics of the cartoons argue that they are culturally insulting and they are right. The press has to be smarter than the Jyllands-Posten and Geraldo Rivera. Some things shouldn’t be reported or printed.
The Rivera case brings up the aspect that since the time of Galileo, the press has reached the pinnacle of its power. This power will not be broken and never will be again. The press has been perceived as having a superior sense of its first Amendment responsibilities. Alstyne Van touched on this in his Interpretations of the First Amendment. “But this cannot be right, can it? A press with superior first amendment rights and immunities in all of these respects” (Van 58)? Does this power allow the press run amok unchecked? Yes it does. However, this does not mean that the press should not act responsibly. Stan Lee said, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” This responsibility is illustrated perfectly with the Denmark cartoon debacle. Danish cartoonists should have thought about the consequences of printing images of Mohammed. This diminutive act caused a lot of trouble in Europe. The press cannot afford to be disrespectful to any group of people. It cannot discriminate against, race, sex, creed, religion, or sexual orientation. It must remain an equal, unchanging source of information. The press has a great responsibility to wield the power that they have been given conscientiously.



















Works Sited
Cater, Douglass. The Fourth Branch of Government. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.
Van, Alstyne. Interpretations of the First Amendment. 3rd ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1984.
"The Constitution of the United States of America.”. ed. 2001.
Allen, David , and Robert Jensen, ed. Freeing the First Amendment. 1st ed. New York: New York University Press, 1995.
Holy Bible. NIV ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.

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"Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the United States was too strong."

President Ronald Reagan

“Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism”

Barry Goldwater