The Captive Press: Foreign Policy Crises and the First Amendment

by Ted Galen Carpenter

How the government's restrictions on the press during the recent international crises challenge the basis of a free press and the First Amendment.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 188257723X
• ISBN13: 9781882577231
• Release Date: June 1995
• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Length: 315 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Excellent

A good book, meticulously researched and lucidly written, on the erosion of press freedoms in America. It reviews briefly the freedom of the press (or lack thereof) in wartime from the early years of the Republic through the two world wars, then covers the Korean War and other foreign conflicts, including (especially) Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf War, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti and others. Analyzed is the government's ever-expanding, Cold War-rationalized power to censor media coverage of foreign interventions to the extent that the government may today censor as it wills and prosecute unauthorized leakages of classified information with a power, affirmed by judicial precedent, almost functionally equivalent to that authorized the government of Great Britain by the infamous Official Secrets Act. It is shown that the government frequently invokes national security to censor journalists for political or other non-military reasons. The nuances of the media-government relationship are explored. Tremendously valuable points are journalists' complicity in their own censorship and their readiness to swallow government propaganda without question. Many of today's journalists, this book shows, view themselves as mere tools in American foreign policy and have forgotten their original role in the defense of freedom from government encroachment.My only major criticism of the book is that it ascribes, in part, government officials' and journalists' disregard of the 1st Amendment to institutional influences in a way that seems to absolve them of guilt, as if, Marxian-style, their jobs determine their ideology. This position is dangerous. It excuses the guilty parties and ignores other possible causal factors. I, for one, can say with absolute certainty that because of my philosophical beliefs I would never--ever--censor journalists for any other reason than to save the lives of the men under my command (if I were in such a position).