In a free society where it often seems nothing is sacred, many feel that one thing at least should be: that despite constitutional guarantees of free speech, it should be illegal to desecrate the American flag. For most Americans, no symbol is more charged with emotion, and incidents of its abuse have led many to declare that freedom of expression has its limits.

When Gregory Lee Johnson burned a flag as part of a political protest, he was convicted for flag desecration under Texas law, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the conviction on First Amendment grounds and the Supreme Court confirmed that physically damaging the flag constituted symbolic-and protected-speech. Robert Justin Goldstein now examines this landmark case and the attendant controversy over whether protection of the flag conflicts with constitutional guarantees of free speech. He also explores the case's ramifications for future legal battles.

Goldstein, who has published widely on the flag desecration debate, offers a concise and updated account of the controversy for students and general readers. He traces the history of the flag protection movement from its nineteenth-century origins through the enactment of early state laws, and he examines modern incidents of flag desecration from the Vietnam era to the present.

At the heart of the book is the Johnson case and the political firestorm that it ignited. Goldstein examines the legal and philosophical issues surrounding the case through courtroom testimony, oral arguments, and interviews with Johnson, the lawyers (including former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr and the late famed "radical attorney" William Kunstler), and the judges who heard the many rounds of appeals. He then takes us inside the Supreme Court to analyze the justices' reasoning that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds it offensive. Finally, he looks at reactions to the decision-including recent heated attempts to protect the flag through legislation or constitutional amendment.

Goldstein helps us better understand the human emotion and psychological drama that underlie abstract legal and constitutional issues and that fundamental rights sometimes are held by the courts to be superior to majority rule or popular emotion. By demonstrating how competing and often contradictory concepts can be embodied in the very same symbol, he helps us understand the fundamental meanings of democracy and patriotism.

An ideal supplement for any course with the goal to make free speech issues meaningful and relevant to young media professionals today.

Features of the text:

1. INTERACTIVE - it helps instructors engage students in meaningful discussions about current free speech issues. It presents situations, often taken from court cases, followed by questions that challenge students to clarify and justify their own beliefs about freedom of expression.
2. INTERNATIONAL - communicates how and why countries and governments, other than the United States, deal with free speech issues in different ways.
3. NEUTRAL- not a flag-waving catechism for the "American way". Asks difficult questions as to whether the freedoms many U. S. citizens take for granted are the best approach to some issues. It develops critical thinking skills.

David Rudenstine effectively captures the day-by-day drama of the Nixon administration's efforts in 1971 to prohibit the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing the 7000-page, top-secret Pentagon Papers. Rudenstine originally shared the dominant historical view that the government's position fell far short of satisfying the heavy burden the law required if the courts were to permanently restrain publication. But after studying previously classified documents and interviewing key participants in the controversy, including Robert MacNamara, Clark Clifford, William Rehnquist, Katherine Graham, and Daniel Ellsberg, Rudenstine changed his mind.

A powerful indictment of contemporary attacks on free speech, this book argues for a vigorous First Amendment jurisprudence protecting even offensive types of speech. In recent years, political activists, academics, and legal specialists have attacked traditional notions of free speech protection as they concern hate speech, obscenity, and pornography. They have called for changes in Supreme Court doctrine in defining the First Amendment and have argued that the traditional view of free speech actually creates and perpetuates a society in which the weak--women, minorities, the poor--have no voice. While recognizing their fears, Nicholas Wolfson argues that it is impossible to separate "bad" speech from "good" speech without fatally compromising the uniquely American concept of free speech, and that efforts to modify our concept of free speech for a greater egalitarian good can only result in undue state influence over private speech. In a keenly argued analysis, he finds that, in the end, the preservation of free and vigorous speech requires a strong First Amendment protection for even the most hateful of speech.

The feminist campaign against pornography, the furore over a racial epithet in the O.J. Simpson trial, and Iran's continuing threat to kill Salman Rushdie exemplify the intense passions aroused by hurtful speech. In this study Richard Abel offers an original framework for understanding and attempting to resolve these pervasive and intractable conflicts. Drawing on sociological theories of symbollic politics, he views such confrontations as struggles for respect among status categories defined by nationality, religion, race gender, sexual orientation and physical difference. The text seeks to expose the inadequacies of the conventional responses to speech: absolutist civil libertarianism and enthusiastic state regulation. Instead the author argues that only apologies exchanged within the communities that construct collective identities can readjust social standing damaged by hurtful words and images. Abel recasts the problem in terms of equalizing cultural capital and aims to open a new pathway through the wrongs and rights of speech.

A controversial argument for reconsidering the limits of free speech Swirling in the midst of the resurgence of neo-Nazi demonstrations, hate speech, and acts of domestic terrorism are uncomfortable questions about the limits of free speech. The United States stands apart from many other countries in that citizens have the power to say virtually anything without legal repercussions. But, in the case of white supremacy, does the First Amendment demand that we defend Nazis? In Must We Defend Nazis?, legal experts Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic argue that it should not. Updated to consider the white supremacy demonstrations and counter-protests in Charlottesville and debates about hate speech on campus and on the internet, the book offers a concise argument against total, unchecked freedom of speech. Delgado and Stefancic instead call for a system of free speech that takes into account the harms that hate speech can inflict upon disempowered, marginalized people. They examine the prevailing arguments against regulating speech, and show that they all have answers. They also show how limiting free speech would work in a legal framework and offer suggestions for activist lawyers and judges interested in approaching the hate speech controversy intelligently. As citizens are confronting free speech in contention with equal dignity, access, and respect, Must We Defend Nazis? puts aside cliches that clutter First Amendment thinking, and presents a nuanced position that recognizes the needs of our increasingly diverse society.

As the world looked on in horror at the Paris terror attacks of January and November 2015, France found itself at the centre of a war that has split across nations and continents. The attacks set in motion a steady creep towards ever more repressive state surveillance, and have fuelled the resurgence of the far right across Europe and beyond, while leaving the left dangerously divided. These developments raise profound questions about a number of issues central to contemporary debates, including the nature of national identity, the limits to freedom of speech, and the role of both traditional and social media. After Charlie Hebdo brings together an international range of scholars to assess the social and political impact of the Paris attacks in Europe and beyond. Cutting through the hysteria that has characterised so much of the initial commentary, it seeks to place these events in their wider global context, untangling the complex symbolic web woven around 'Charlie Hebdo' to pose the fundamental question - how best to combat racism in our supposedly 'post-racial' age?

Censorship and book burning are still present in our lives. Lawrence Hill shares his experiences of how ignorance and the fear of ideas led a group in the Netherlands to burn the cover of his widely successful novel, The Book of Negroes, in 2011. Why do books continue to ignite such strong reactions in people in the age of the Internet? Is banning, censoring, or controlling book distribution ever justified? Hill illustrates his ideas with anecdotes and lists names of Canadian writers who faced censorship challenges in the twenty-first century, inviting conversation between those on opposite sides of these contentious issues. All who are interested in literature, freedom of expression, and human rights will enjoy reading Hill's provocative essay.

Tolerated in Britain for over 300 years-and ubiquitous throughout the world for much longer - visual satire gives offence in the quickest way and in its purest form. Cartoons have long since established themselves as a legitimate part of the general political discourse. As a cartoonist, it is Rowson's job to give offence. But the flip side of giving offence is, of course, giving comfort to the opponents or victims of the offended. In "Giving Offence", Rowson explains how and why cartoons work, why they matter and why the reactions of the offended are often an even blunter political weapon than the cartoons themselves. This book is in collaboration with "Index on Censorship".

Never in human history was there such a chance for freedom of expression. If we have Internet access, any one of us can publish almost anything we like and potentially reach an audience of millions. Never was there a time when the evils of unlimited speech flowed so easily across frontiers: violent intimidation, gross violations of privacy, tidal waves of abuse. A pastor burns a Koran in Florida and UN officials die in Afghanistan. Drawing on a lifetime of writing about dictatorships and dissidents, Timothy Garton Ash argues that in this connected world that he calls cosmopolis, the way to combine freedom and diversity is to have more but also better free speech. Across all cultural divides we must strive to agree on how we disagree. He draws on a thirteen-language global online project - freespeechdebate.com - conducted out of Oxford University and devoted to doing just that. With vivid examples, from his personal experience of China's Orwellian censorship apparatus to the controversy around Charlie Hebdo to a very English court case involving food writer Nigella Lawson, he proposes a framework for civilized conflict in a world where we are all becoming neighbours.

Few virtues are as celebrated in contemporary culture as openness. Rooted in software culture and carrying more than a whiff of Silicon Valley technical utopianism, openness--of decision-making, data, and organizational structure--is seen as the cure for many problems in politics and business.
But what does openness mean, and what would a political theory of openness look like? With "Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness," Nathaniel Tkacz uses Wikipedia, the most prominent product of open organization, to analyze the theory and politics of openness in practice--and to break its spell. Through discussions of edit wars, article deletion policies, user access levels, and more, Tkacz enables us to see how the key concepts of openness--including collaboration, ad-hocracy, and the splitting of contested projects through "forking"--play out in reality.
The resulting book is the richest critical analysis of openness to date, one that roots media theory in messy reality and thereby helps us move beyond the vaporware promises of digital utopians and take the first steps toward truly understanding what openness does, and does not, have to offer.

Over the past two decades, there have been a series of events that have brought into question the concept and practice of free expression. In this new book, Winston provides an account of the current state of freedom of expression in the western world. He analyses all the most pertinent cases of conflict during the last two decades - including the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the incident of the Danish cartoons and offended celebrities - examining cultural, legal and journalistic aspects of each case. A Right to Offend offers us a deeper understanding of the increasingly threatening environment in which free speech operates and is defended, as well as how it informs and is central to journalism practice and media freedom more generally. It is important reading for all those interested in freedom of expression in the twenty-first century.

Don't Stop the Music

Read about the songs they tried to ban, the musicians stopped for playing live, and the singers who are put on trial in the bumper Smashed Hits issue of Index.

What a Carve Up

Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Clash manager Peter Jenner on hidden censorship in the music biz.

Yalla

Cairo, Beirut, Amman: Musician Khyam Allami travel the middle east

Finding Bird

Jazz star Gilad Atzmon on Charlie Parker

Kurdish Blues

Kaya Genc on the singers they try to silence

My Life is Under Threat

Lapiro de Mbanga speaks to Index from his Prison Cell

Plus

Chaza Charafeddine's Unmissable Divine Comedy Exhibition

Index on Censorship is an award-winning magazine, devoted to protecting and promoting free expression. International in outlook, outspoken in comment, Index on Censorship reports on free expression violations around the world, publishes banned writing and shines a light on vital free expression issues through original, challenging and intelligent commentary and analysis, publishing some of the world's finest writers.

Forthcoming December 2010: Issue 39/4,

Writers in Prison

For subscription options visit: http: //ioc.sagepub.com

www.indexoncensorship.org: the place to turn for free up-to-the-minute free expression news and comment

Winner 2008 Amnesty International Consumer Magazine of the Year

The result of years of critical analysis of Israeli media law, this book argues that the laws governing Israeli electronic media are structured to limit the boundaries of public discourse. Amit M. Schejter posits the theory of a "mute democracy," one in which the media are designed to provide a platform for some voices to be heard over others. While Israel's institutions may be democratic, and while the effect of these policies may be limited, this book contends that free speech in Israel is institutionally muted to ensure the continued domination of the Jewish majority and its preferred interpretation of what Israel means as a Jewish-democratic state. Analyzing a wide range of legal documents recorded in Israel from 1961 to 2007, "Muting Israeli Democracy" demonstrates in scrupulous detail how law and policy are used to promote the hegemonic national culture through the constraints and obligations set on electronic media.

FDR's Four Freedoms-Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear-were presented to the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address, and they became the inspiration for a second bill of rights, extending the New Deal and guaranteeing work, housing, medical care, and education. Although the bill never was adopted in a legal sense in this country, its principles pervaded the political landscape for an entire generation, including the War on Poverty and the Great Society reforms of the 1960s. Furthermore, the ideas expressed in the Four Freedoms speech inspired the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But since the late 1970s and early 1980s, these freedoms have been under assault, from administrations of both parties, economic pressures, and finally, the alleged requirements of national security. After 9/11, this process accelerated even more rapidly. The authors address the hard questions of individual freedom versus national security that are on the minds of Americans of all political stripes. They bring together the pivotal events, leaders, policies, and fateful decisions-often pathbreaking, more often ending in folly-that have subverted our constitutional government from its founding. "You reach the inescapable conclusion," the authors write, "that the United States is a warrior nation, has been addicted to war from the start, and is able to sustain its warfare habit only by mugging American taxpayers, and believing in its mission as God's chosen." With a foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich, a journalist, activist, and the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America."

This book contains the oral testimony of victims of pornography, spoken on the record for the first time in history.

Speaking at hearings on a groundbreaking antipornography civil rights law, women offer eloquent witness to the devastation pornography has caused in their lives. Supported by social science experts and authorities on rape, battery, and prostitution, discounted and opposed by free speech advocates and absolutists, their riveting testimony articulates the centrality of pornography to sexual abuse and inequity today.

At issue in these hearings is a law conceived and drafted by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon that defines harm done through pornography as a legal injury of sex discrimination warranting civil redress. From the first set of hearings in Minneapolis in 1983 through those before the Massachusetts state legislature in 1992, the witnesses heard here expose the commonplace reality of denigration and sexual subordination due to pornography and refute the widespread notion that pornography is harmless expression that must be protected by the state.

Introduced with powerful essays by MacKinnon and Dworkin, these hearings--unabridged and with each word scrupulously verified--constitute a unique record of a conflict over the meaning of democracy itself--a major civil rights struggle for our time and a fundamental crisis in United States constitutional law: Can we sacrifice the lives of women and children to a pornographer's right to free "speech"? Can we allow the First Amendment to shield sexual exploitation and predatory sexual violence? These pages contain all the arguments for protecting pornography--and dramatically document its human cost.

In his book "Human Rights: Group Defamation, Freedom of Expression and" "the Law of Nations," Thomas David Jones presents a discussion and analysis of the laws governing group defamation and speech inciteful of racial hatred in Great Britain, Canada, India, Nigeria, and the United States. Although there exists no federal group defamation law in the United States, a few state legislatures have promulgated group defamation statutes, while a cause of action for group defamation has been recognized as justiciable in the decision law of other states. Mr Jones describes his theory as constitutional minimalism because he does not advocate the legal proscription of all derogatory hate speech. Only the sub-category of hate speech that fulfills the standard elements of proof found in common law defamation claim will be prosecuted criminally by the federal government. The author further asserts that a carefully and narrowly drafted federal criminal group defamation statute will pass constitutional muster without creating a conflict with First Amendment rights.

How free is the speech of someone who can't be heard? Not very--and this, Owen Fiss suggests, is where the First Amendment comes in. In this book, a marvel of conciseness and eloquence, Fiss reframes the debate over free speech to reflect the First Amendment's role in ensuring public debate that is, in Justice William Brennan's words, truly "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open." Hate speech, pornography, campaign spending, funding for the arts: the heated, often overheated, struggle over these issues generally pits liberty, as embodied in the First Amendment, against equality, as in the Fourteenth. Fiss presents a democratic view of the First Amendment that transcends this opposition. If equal participation is a precondition of free and open public debate, then the First Amendment encompasses the values of both equality and liberty. By examining the silencing effects of speech--its power to overwhelm and intimidate the underfunded, underrepresented, or disadvantaged voice--Fiss shows how restrictions on political expenditures, hate speech, and pornography can be defended in terms of the First Amendment, not despite it. Similarly, when the state requires the media to air voices of opposition, or funds art that presents controversial or challenging points of view, it is doing its constitutional part to protect democratic self-rule from the aggregations of private power that threaten it. Where most liberal accounts cast the state as the enemy of freedom and the First Amendment as a restraint, this one reminds us that the state can also be the friend of freedom, protecting and fostering speech that might otherwise die unheard, depriving our democracy of the full range and richness of its expression.

The power and status of the press in America reached new heights after spectacular reporting triumphs in the segregated South, in Vietnam, and in Washington during the Watergate years. Then new technologies created instantaneous global reporting which left the government unable to control the flow of information to the nation. The press thus became a formidable rival in critical struggles to control what the people know and when they know it. But that was more power than the press could handle--and journalism crashed toward new lows in public esteem and public purpose. The dazzling new technologies, profit-driven owners, and celebrated editors, reporters, and broadcasters made it possible to bypass older values and standards of journalism. Journalists reveled in lusty pursuit after the power of politics, the profits of entertainment and trespass into privacy. Richard Reeves was there at the rise and at the fall, beginning as a small-town editor, becoming the chief political correspondent of the New York Times and then a best-selling author and award-winning documentary filmmaker. He tells the story of a tribe that lost its way. From the Pony Express to the Internet, he chronicles what happened to the press as America accelerated into uncertainty, arguing that to survive, the press must go back to doing what it was hired to do long ago: stand as outsiders watching government and politics on behalf of a free people busy with their own affairs.

The Reckoning will examine America's national trauma, rooted in its long history of slavery and civil rights abuses, but dramatically exacerbated by the impact of recent events and the Trump administration's corrupt and immoral policies.

America's failure to acknowledge this trauma, let alone root it out, has allowed it to metastasize. Whether it manifests itself in rising levels of rage and hatred, or hopelessness and apathy, the stress of living in a country many no longer recognize has affected everyone. America is suffering from PTSD - a new leader alone cannot fix it.

An enormous amount of healing must be done to rebuild faith in America's leadership and hope for the nation. It starts with The Reckoning.