The Audience Reflected in the Medium of Law: A Critique of the Political Economy of Speech Rights in the United States (original) (raw)
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Scope of the Course: The effects of media on the social, economic, political and cultural spheres of life have been increasing significantly since the nineteenth century. In fact, there is a curious overlap between the transformation of the public sphere and the rise of mass media. This course will examine the points of juncture between the public sphere and mass media at the intersection of capitalism, liberal democracy and patriarchy. More specifically, this course will investigate the concepts of the public and the private; the social and the intimate as well as the relationship between public morality, private morality and media; the 'public,' 'publicness' and communications; alternative publics and alternative media through the lenses of different theories of the public sphere. In this course, we will read The main questions this course will ask are: 1) What are the junction points between history and theory in the transformation of the public sphere and the rise of the mass media? 2) What are the (non-)normative implications of different theories of the public sphere on the understanding of media? 3) How can one conceptualize alternative mass media and social media in terms of public-private distinction? 4) What is the significance of public sphere in the mediation of human communication? Why? At the end of the term the students will have accumulated knowledge of the theories of public sphere with a historical perspective; acquired theoretical and methodological knowledge, which are required to assess the effect of the mass media in the construction, narrowing down, extension and transformation of the public sphere; and developed a critical perspective on the function of the mass media in the transformation of the distinction between the public and the private in late-capitalist societies. The course also aims to investigate the possibilities for revealing the immediacy of the connections between the " theoretical " and everyday experiences through communication. In this respect, the course will also offer a venue for a collaborative autoethnographic preliminary study that involves cooperative research agendas of the students and the lecturer. The collaborative study, which will center on the question of the differentiations in the way audience/readers understand and communicate through the public-private distinctions will evolve through three lines: 1. The students' and lecturer's daily notes about the weekly discussions on the theoretical approaches, covered in the course with a view to a. their daily experiences b. which media they use most frequently in conveying these experiences and how; 2. The students' and lecturer's interactive readings of and notes on the three films that will be watched throughout Fall 2016; 3. Discussions on cross-cutting reflections of ethnicity, gender, class and age on the way our subjective and cooperative readings on the public-private distinctions.
The Philosophical Quarterly, 1992
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Starting from the classic ethical problems and reviewing the modern regulated ethical norms regarding freedom of speech and its limitations in media communication, the current paper aims to verify the following hypotheses in media communication: (1) Alerting European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) of the infringement on freedom of speech entails a positive response for journalists who fight for this right, (2) Press censorship is the result of editorial policy and the political orientation of the press, which can generate mass resignations of journalists, (3) The more politicised the media institutions, the more limited the right to freedom of speech is for journalists.
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