The News Media & The Law, No 35:3: Journalists, Whistleblowers and National Security (2011)

Despite a major victory for source protection, recent prosecutions indicate a government clampdown on whistleblowers.

Publisher Lucy A. Dalglish, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Summer 2011
Editor Gregg P. Leslie
Managing Editor Peter Haldis
Contributing Editor Mark Caramanica
Contributors Christine Beckett, Derek D. Green, Clara Hogan, Aaron Mackey, Emily Peterson, Kristen Rasmussen
ISSN: 0149-0737

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Kate Holbrook, Ann S. Kim, Brian Palmer, Anna Portnoy (eds.): Global Values 101: A Short Course (2006)

Global Values 101 grew out of one of the most popular courses ever offered at Harvard University, in which some of the most original thinkers of our day sat down with students and explored how ideas have made them-and can make us-more engaged, involved, and compassionate citizens. In these engrossing, essay-length interviews, which address the topics of war, religion, the global economy, and social change, Amy Goodman, host of the popular radio program Democracy Now, speaks about the role of the independent media as gatekeeper and witness; Lani Guinier, author of Tyranny of the Majority, reveals that students’ SAT scores more accurately describe the kind of car their parents drive than the grades they will earn in college and shows the way to a more equitable college admissions system; Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, explores the American Dream and exposes the myth of the “good war”; economist Juliet Schor, author of Born to Buy and The Overspent American, explains why Americans are willing to sacrifice quality of life to attain financial success; former “mall rat” Naomi Klein, author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, urges readers to go global while fighting global conglomerates; and Katha Pollitt, author of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, employs her incisive wit to explore what it really means to be a feminist in the Twenty First century.

For anyone who has been moved by idealism and longed to become a more proactive citizen, this collection offers a range of stories on how progressive ethics can inform, inspire, and ultimately transform lives.

Publisher Beacon Press, 2006
ISBN 0807003050, 9780807003053
276 pages

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Yochai Benkler: A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle Over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate (draft, 2011)

A study of the events surrounding the Wikileaks document releases in 2010 provides a rich set of insights about the weaknesses and sources of resilience of the emerging networked fourth estate. It marks the emergence of a new model of watchdog function, one that is neither purely networked nor purely traditional, but is rather a mutualistic interaction between the two. It identifies the peculiar risks to, and sources of resilience of, the networked fourth estate in a multidimensional system of expression and restraint, and suggests the need to resolve a major potential vulnerability—the extralegal cooperation between the government and private infrastructure companies to restrict speech without being bound by the constraints of legality. Finally, it offers a richly detailed event study of the complexity of the emerging networked fourth estate, and the interaction, both constructive and destructive, between the surviving elements of the traditional model and the emerging elements of the new. It teaches us that the traditional, managerial-professional sources of responsibility in a free press function imperfectly under present market conditions, while the distributed models of mutual criticism and universal skeptical reading, so typical of the Net, are far from powerless to deliver effective criticism and self-correction where necessary. The future likely is, as the Guardian described its own experience with Wikileaks, “a new model of co-operation,” between surviving elements of the traditional, mass-mediated fourth estate, and its emerging networked models. The transition to this new model will likely be anything but smooth.

Working Paper of article forthcoming in the Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review.
8 February 2011 version.
66 pages

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