There Is No Such Thing As A Free Press
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There is No Such Thing as a Free Press
The aim of this book is to a launch a polemic for the freedom of the press against all of the attempts to police, defile and sanitise journalism today. Once the media reported the news. Now it makes it. From the phone-hacking scandal to rows about press regulation, super-injunctions, leaks, libel and privacy laws, the power of the Murdoch empire, and the future of the BBC, the media has become the story. The British press is in crisis and under scrutiny as never before. In the fall-out from the phone-hacking scandal one national newspaper has already been closed down and some would like to see others go the same way. However, this book argues that there is not too much media freedom in Britain today, but too little. There are not too few controls and restrictions on what can legitimately be published and broadcast, but too many - both formal and informal. Some newspapers in Britain and elsewhere might be going 'free' in financial terms, under pressure from declining sales and the new online media. But in almost every way that matters, the press is less free - thanks both to external constraints and the internal corrosion of the foundations of good journalism. This book aims to shake up the one-way 'debate' about the freedom of the media. It will argue that the media's standing has been undermined both from without and within, and put the case for standing up both to the censors and to the conformists in all their guises.
There is No Such Thing as a Free Press
The aim of this book is to a launch a polemic for the freedom of the press against all of the attempts to police, defile and sanitise journalism today. Once the media reported the news. Now it makes it. The phone-hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry into the "culture, practice and ethics" of the media has put the UK press under scrutiny and on trial as never before. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Press questions many of today's distorted but widely-held views of the media, and turns the assumptions underlying the current discussion on their head. The problem is not that the UK press has too much freedom to run wild, but too little liberty. The trouble is not that the UK press is too far out-of-control, but that it is far too conformist. The danger is not that press freedom is too open to abuse, but that the British media is not nearly open enough. Mick Hume draws on the lessons of history and cross-examines the evidence from the Leveson Inquiry to take on the army of conformists and regulators who would further tame press freedom.
There's No Such Thing As Free Speech
Author: Stanley Fish
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 1994-12-15
In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.