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An examination of how the postwar United States twisted its ideal
of "the free flow of information" into a one-sided export of values
and a tool with global consequences. When the dust settled after
World War II, the United States stood as the world's unquestionably
pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that
followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible
but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its
media, and-perhaps most importantly-its alleged values. In A
Righteous Smokescreen, Sam Lebovic homes in on one of the most
prominent, yet ethereal, of those professed values: the free flow
of information. This trope was seen as capturing what was most
liberal about America's self-declared leadership of the free world.
But as Lebovic makes clear, even though diplomats and public
figures trumpeted the importance of widespread cultural exchange,
these transmissions flowed in only one direction: outward from the
United States. Though other countries did try to promote their own
cultural visions, Lebovic shows that the US moved to marginalize or
block those visions outright, highlighting the shallowness of
American commitments to multilateral institutions, the depth of its
unstated devotion to cultural and economic supremacy, and its
surprising hostility to importing foreign cultures. His book
uncovers the unexpectedly profound global consequences buried in
such ostensibly mundane matters as visa and passport policy,
international educational funding, and land purchases for
embassies. Even more crucially, A Righteous Smokescreen does
nothing less than reveal that globalization was not the inevitable
consequence of cultural convergence or the natural outcome of
putatively free flows of information-it was always political to its
core.
Does America have a free press? Many who answer yes appeal to First
Amendment protections that shield the press from government
censorship. But in this comprehensive history of American press
freedom as it has existed in theory, law, and practice, Sam Lebovic
shows that, on its own, the right of free speech has been
insufficient to guarantee a free press. Lebovic recovers a vision
of press freedom, prevalent in the mid-twentieth century, based on
the idea of unfettered public access to accurate information. This
"right to the news" responded to persistent worries about the
quality and diversity of the information circulating in the
nation's news. Yet as the meaning of press freedom was contested in
various arenas-Supreme Court cases on government censorship,
efforts to regulate the corporate newspaper industry, the drafting
of state secrecy and freedom of information laws, the unionization
of journalists, and the rise of the New Journalism-Americans chose
to define freedom of the press as nothing more than the right to
publish without government censorship. The idea of a public right
to all the news and information was abandoned, and is today largely
forgotten. Free Speech and Unfree News compels us to reexamine
assumptions about what freedom of the press means in a democratic
society-and helps us make better sense of the crises that beset the
press in an age of aggressive corporate consolidation in media
industries, an increasingly secretive national security state, and
the daily newspaper's continued decline.
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