Freedom of speech : mightier than the sword /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Shipler, David K., 1942-
Edition:First edition.
Imprint:New York : Alfred A. Knopf, ©2015.
Description:viii, 336 pages ; 25 cm
Language:English
Subject:United States. -- Constitution. -- 1st Amendment.
Constitution (United States)
Freedom of speech -- United States.
POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Civil Rights.
LAW / Civil Rights.
POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Democracy.
Freedom of speech.
United States.
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10197632
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780307957320 (hardback)
0307957322 (hardback)
9780307947611 (pbk.)
0307947610 (pbk.)
Notes:Includes bibliographical references (pages [313]-318) and index.
Summary:"From the longtime New York Times reporter, best-selling author, and Pulitzer Prize winner-- an expansive, timely assessment of the state of free speech in America. David Shipler's recent best seller, The Working Poor, cemented his place among our most trenchant social commentators. Now, he turns his keen, illuminating focus to another endangered American ideal: freedom of speech. Through selected accounts of First Amendment invocation and infringement, Shipler maps a rapidly shifting topography of political and cultural norms: parents in Michigan rallying to teachers vilified for their reading lists; conservative ministers risking their churches' tax-exempt status to preach politics from the pulpit; national security reporters using techniques more common in dictatorships to avoid leak prosecution; history teachers in Texas quietly navigating around a conservative curriculum to give students access to unapproved perspectives. Anchored in personal stories--sometimes shocking, sometimes absurd, sometimes dishearteningly familiar--but encompassing a theme as sweeping and essential as democracy itself, Freedom of Speech brilliantly reveals the triumphs and challenges of defining and protecting the boundaries of free expression in modern America"--
Review by New York Times Review

FREE SPEECH MARTYRDOM ain't what it used to be in these United States. Over the past half-century, the courts have widened and re-widened the channel through which our rights to speech flow. Smut prosecutions are largely a thing of the past (with the exception of child pornography, of course). The Postal Service hasn't actively fished the mails for "obscene" novels in decades. A series of Supreme Court decisions, starting with 1964's New York Times v. Sullivan, have disarmed those who would inhibit free expression with libel suits. Another measure of free speech glory: Lenny Bruce's explicit stand-up act earned him court trouble and a four-month sentence to Rikers Island more than 50 years ago, whereas today, the same material would land him an HBO series. Finally, thanks to the Internet, Americans by the hundreds of millions can create and partake of free speech with few restrictions or repercussions. Still, there's trouble in paradise, the former New York Times reporter David K. Shipler finds in "Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword." Our free speech bounty still produces discord, he writes. He crisscrosses the land to provide closeups of five clashes: Parents are rumbling with teachers and administrators over which novels get assigned in class ; federal prosecutors are muzzling whistle-blowers and journalists; a theater faces defunding for its edgy political work; on the Internet, bigots are testing our free speech principles; and across the nation, activists fear that the Citizens United decision will allow the moneyed to smother free speech with television commercials. Diving into the rancor, Shipler begins in a suburban Detroit school district where Graham Swift's 1983 novel "Waterland" prompts a minor moral panic after it is assigned to Advanced Placement English students. Toni Morrison's "Beloved," also assigned, plays a supporting role in the panic, as parents protest the explicit content in both books. Here, Shipler is at his best, burrowing into the community to give all sides a fair say. Only the heartless will fail to sympathize with the parents, and Shipler treats them with generosity, writing in his afterword that he "came to know something of their anguished desires to insulate their teenage children for as long as they can." The "Waterland" passage that provokes the greatest ire describes the sexual foreplay of two 15-year-olds. The section is sufficiently prurient that no daily newspaper - including the one you're now reading - would reproduce the passage unless it had an extraordinary reason to do so. It's hard to fault parents for echoing newspaper standards. "We're not telling people how to parent their kids," one protesting parent says. "We just don't want anybody telling us how to parent ours." Still, book uproars tend to follow a standard progression, and nobody emerges from them looking very good. Objecting parents - fretting that premature exposure to sexual, blasphemous or rebellious content will have a deleterious effect on their offspring - seem overprotective and unsophisticated. Teachers look to be working too hard to defend the pedagogical worth of some of the books they've selected. That "Waterland"/"Beloved" pairing, Shipler writes, was supposed to instruct students in the fundamentals of "postmodern nonlinear structure and New Historicism." Meanwhile, administrators come off as spineless if they withdraw the book from a class, as the school superintendent did in the case of "Waterland," or tyrannical if they seize upon legal precedent to assign books and determine curriculum. ("Waterland" was eventually returned to A.R English duty and was paired again with "Beloved" - which, despite its profane language and graphic sex scenes, weathered the challenge and was never removed.) Shipler's retelling of the "Waterland" controversy is full of narrative detail and drama, but placed in context, these skirmishes are isolated and rare. The United States operates an estimated 22,000 public high schools, and only about 400 to 500 book challenges are known to be lodged in schools each year, Shipler writes, making them look like a rounding error in our free speech accounting. His efforts to amplify the background noise of these quarrels into a major - or even a symbolic - free speech battle disappoint. The A.P. English class Shipler writes about was ultimately an elective, not a requirement. "Freedom of Speech" fails to scintillate for a couple of reasons. The five big free speech themes Shipler explores are more second cousins to one another than siblings, which means he gains little thematic momentum as he switches from book uproars to whistle-blowers to bigots to the perils of corporate money and, finally, to artistic freedom. All of the book's many crosshatched character sketches and narrative details can't save it from reading more like several overwritten magazine articles bound between hard covers than a unified book about freedom of speech. Its sprawl and lack of urgency will discourage even the most tenacious reader. Shipler does an adequate job of refreshing the story of the former Justice Department official Thomas Tamm, who was an important source for The New York Times's 2005 scoop about the government's secret monitoring of phone calls and emails. There's potential tension here, as Tamm leaks what he considers to be an unlawful surveillance program and pays the price as an F.B.I. investigation targets him and he is threatened with prosecution for espionage. But Shipler is so clearly on Tamm's side that he doesn't bother to recruit a respectable source from the legal or national security establishments to present the argument that Tamm's conduct could be considered wrong and unlawful. Even if you identify with Tamm, as I do, it comes off as a fixed fight. Opinionating by Shipler on the topic of corporate campaign money similarly prevents that chapter from reaching full flower. In his discussion of Citizens United, he writes, "A more realistic proposal consistent with the First Amendment would allow government to give campaigns $5 or $6 for every dollar raised from small contributors, those who donated $150 or less," he writes. Again, what's needed here is not the expunging of Shipler's views from the chapter, but a more expansive debate within his views. The idea that the government should repel the deluge of corporate campaign dollars by issuing its own torrent presupposes that government money doesn't compromise free speech but that corporate money does. if the best measure of a book is how vigorously it causes a reader to quarrel with it, "Freedom of Speech" excels. In the book's last section, Shipler recounts how a Washington theater that staged controversial works and sponsored freewheeling discussion became the target of a small pressure group, which sought to disrupt its funding. Such pressure is neither censorship nor suppression of free speech. No theater, no poet, no filmmaker, no painter, no artist has a free-speech right to other people's money. Indeed, deciding what sort of art you spend your (or your group's) money on can be one of the highest expressions of free speech. Another way to appreciate "Freedom of Speech" is to read it as evidence that our First Amendment rights are in good repair. Oh, there may be a snake or two on the loose, but what paradise doesn't have a tempting serpent? The Postal Service hasn't fished the mails for 'obscene' novels in decades. JACK SHAFER writes about the press for Politico.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review

Probably because it can be so personal, freedom of speech is likely the most cherished of American rights. But incredible shifts in the cultural, political, and social landscape, particularly in the liberating venue of the Internet, have complicated this basic right. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Shipler offers a broad and deep look at free speech, from the acquiescence of workers whose speech is restricted by their employers to conservative ministers willing to lose their tax exemption to maintain the right to speak their minds. Shipler focuses on literature, journalism, politics, and theater for examples of strident conflict about the meanings and boundaries of free speech. Drawing on interviews with a cross section of Americans parents and teachers, preachers and playwrights, liberals, moderates, conservatives, and libertarians Shipler details the passion behind defense of free speech. He chronicles heated battles spilling over from school- and library-board meetings to the Internet to parking lots, including one case of conservatives elected to a library board who eventually lobbied for the right to bring guns into the library. A fascinating look at one of our fundamental rights.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Less a sharp blade than a sticky, tangled web is the image conveyed by this nuanced survey of American free-speech controversies. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Shipler ('Rights at Risk') investigates recent showdowns related to the issue: parents trying to ban novels with sex scenes from high school English classes, the government prosecuting whistle-blowers for speaking up about government surveillance abuses, preachers resisting IRS rules against electioneering from the pulpit, a Jewish theater fighting to retain funding for a play about a possible Israeli atrocity against Palestinians. These aren't all stories of heroic freedom fighters; while Shipler calls himself a near absolutist when it comes to the First Amendment, he allows that much embattled speech is ugly, hateful, or just plain stupid, and his sympathetic reportage recognizes concerns on all sides (sometimes to excess: he tends to let his subjects' rambling speechifying about speech go on for far too long). Shipler wants to show that, even in polarized contexts, an abundance of speech usually prods people a few steps closer to mutual comprehension. In the wake of the 'Charlie Hebdo' massacre, his probing exploration of quieter confrontations reminds us how America's robust free-speech culture encourages citizens to talk, rather than shoot, issues out. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (May 12) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.


Review by Library Journal Review

Former New York Times reporter Shipler (The Rights of the People; The Working Poor) has written a book about the difficulties of freedom of speech in practice. Each chapter examines the ways society places limits on free speech. The author argues that the practice is restrained by culture, as in Part 1, in which he discusses several instances of censorship in classrooms and school libraries across the country. Throughout the rest of the book, he investigates the issues that complicate free speech, such as national security, race, class, and party politics. -Shipler's examination of poverty as a barrier to free speech-a subject that is not often discussed-is the most exciting section. Using the controversy surrounding the Affordable Healthcare Act, the author details how low-income populations are excluded from the lawmaking process by their lack of access and influence. VERDICT This book addresses a timely subject and is written by someone with a deep interest in the controversies and difficulties surrounding freedom of speech. Recommended for large public libraries, academic libraries, law schools and law students, political science students, and informed lay readers.-Becky Kennedy, Atlanta-Fulton P.L. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A Pulitzer Prize winner surveys the American cultural and political landscape and asks if "the freedom to hear" remains intact.Near the end of his narrative, Shipler (Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America, 2012, etc.) thanks one of his many interview subjects for her time, and she in turn thanks him for his attention: "The listener is everything in telling a story." The remark serves as both apt praise for his alert reportorial skills and as a succinct expression of the focus of this odd-angle take on freedom of speech. The author features a wide variety of writers and speakers who inject ideas, information, disinformation, prejudice, and fear into the marketplace, but he also focuses on the marketplace itself, on those auditors who wish to hear no "evil," no truth, nothing at all discomfiting to their own views. Shipler surveys the limits of what is legally, economically, and culturally permissible, looking, for example, at what happens when parents challenge the inclusion of controversial books in the high school curriculum; when government employees, and the reporters to whom they leak, expose classified information; when a Washington, D.C., theater stages performances about Arabs and Jews that address the historical narratives of both sides. The author explores the fallout from political speech corrupted by outright deceit and the connection between money and political expression. He discovers a pattern in "the cultural limits of bigotry" in which the innuendos of right-wing radio talkers go uncensored while the careless one-time remarks of a blue-collar worker or a small-town official become occasions for firing. Of course, no bigot identifies as one, any more than would-be censors identify as free speech opponents. Rather, they object to certain speech, citing a more important value, say, protecting children or national security or fairness. Shipler describes himself as the closest thing to an "absolutist on the First Amendment as possible without quite being one." Good stories, great interviews, and a potent plea on behalf of vigilant listening. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review


Review by Booklist Review


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Review by Kirkus Book Review