A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Monday, February 26, 2007

COMM 317: Assignment for Tue. (Feb. 27)

Here are the links to tomorrow (Tuesday) night's assignment. I announced it in class last week, but the links will make it easier for you to find the readings ... and class discussion questions ... in class.

It's all on University of Missouri Kansas City law professor Doug Linder's webpage on prior restraints. Well, not quite all of it. You'll want to do a Google search on the two new cases ... New York Times Co. v. United States (1971) and United States v. Progressive (1979).

Pentagon Papers

This case is styled New York Times Co. v. United States, but it's commonly known as the Pentagon Papers. It dealt with the publication of "leaked" documents by The Times and The Washington Post showing that parts of the case for the Vietnam war were trumped up by the government, issues that are back in the news today. The case itself is pretty straightforward, and you should be able to find good summaries. I'd start with Wikipedia's summary of the Pentagon Papers and the litigation over their publication that culminated in New York Times Co. v. United States. Of particular interest might be the U.S. State Department's summary of the case in the February 1997 issue of its Issues of Democracy electronic magazine. It's good on the First Amendment issues, less so on why the Pentagon Papers were so controversial in the first place.

Progressive story on H-bomb

You'll find less written about this case, but it raises some interesting issues. So I'll help you with links. Here's a link to an article in Time magazine on the Progressive H-bomb case. It was written right after the Milwaukee district court decision that is reproduced on Linder's page, and it gives a good summary of his reasoning and the case up to that point. In plain English, no less!

And here's a link to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story 20 years later. It sums up the court action, which ended not with a bang but a whimper when the government dropped the case and The Progressive published the story six months later. (The government dropped it because another publication, located outside the U.S., published the H-bomb recipe in the meantime. So the case, as lawyers say, was moot.) The Journal Sentinel's headline, IMHO, says it all: "Two decades later, little fallout from H-bomb article."

But the issues are fascinating. In a way, it's a good thing the U.S. Supreme Court never ruled on it. That way we can keep discussing them.

If you had been on the Supreme Court and the case was appealed to you, how would you have ruled? Here's one that's even more to the point: If you were editor of The Progressive, would you have run the story? Why? Or why not? What are the arguments in favor? Against? How do they balance out?

In addition to the questions above, be ready to answer the questions on prior restraint at the bottom of Linder's webpage, too.

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About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.