Ombudsman columns

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Is the press guilty of treason?
Ombudsman Many regard robust exercise of First Amendment rights by either the press or the people as a dangerous problem in the fight against terrorism.  08.08.02

The Supreme Court's 'secondary' thoughts
Ombudsman While Alameda Books ruling appears to bolster efforts to regulate adult businesses, several justices express concern that evolving secondary-effects doctrine threatens First Amendment.  07.30.02

Putting corporate security before national security
Ombudsman Government is asking private citizens to take on more responsibilities, but is considering bribing private businesses to enlist in war on terrorism.  07.22.02

Congress must champion access
Ombudsman Government information must be branded as crucial to democracy, to responsible governance and to freedom.  07.11.02

Denial of access shushes the democratic dialogue
Ombudsman Some restrictions are warranted to guard against attack, but as government demands more information of Americans, it's asking Americans to demand less information from government.  12.12.01

The more we know, the more secure we are
Ombudsman It defies reason that we'd rush to limit information that has no real bearing on national security or military operations.  12.07.01

The war on journalism
Ombudsman Closing off information to the public by squeezing the press leaves us in the dark with pundit prattle, poor policies and panic.  10.22.01

Freedom flees in terror from Sept. 11 disaster
Ombudsman Do we really want to add constitutional freedoms to the sorrowful list of casualties?  09.19.01

The making of a First Amendment martyr
Ombudsman Journalist Vanessa Leggett sits in jail because she won’t become an investigative pawn of government.  08.22.01

Freedom of speech: Rated 'R' for restricted
Ombudsman Voluntary rating systems don’t go far enough for those who would dictate what we see in the comfort of a theater or listen to in the privacy of our homes.  07.19.01

The thought police: Lay down your rights and back away slowly!
Ombudsman Law enforcement seems to be increasingly involved in hauling people off to court for committing acts of expression.  06.21.01

Ducking questions, principal puts reporter in handcuffs
Ombudsman Trying to report feature on baby ducks at Virginia school lands Kelly Campbell of Potomac News in jail.  06.15.01

Will Supreme Court give primacy to privacy?
Ombudsman If justices protect cell-phone privacy at the expense of First Amendment free-press rights, we'll all lose.  01.04.01

First Amendment: still under siege at age 209
Ombudsman Spoiling this year's birthday party are those who sense they can restrict our first freedoms by tapping into deep resentments of ordinary people against expression they despise.  12.15.00

A hero without sword or shield
Ombudsman William Lawbaugh stood up for campus press freedom at Mount Saint Mary's College in Maryland, and has paid a steep price.  11.27.00

A leaky bureaucracy is good for democracy
Ombudsman Through legislative legerdemain, we nearly ended up with a law that would have punished those who seek to promote good government.  11.10.00

Trying to shut out the light by banning books
Ombudsman First came the press, then came pressure not to print "dangerous publications," a regrettable tilt toward censorship that persists across the centuries.  09.25.00

A panic of biblical proportions over media violence
Ombudsman Have you heard the one about '1,000 studies linking media to violence'? They don't exist.  08.21.00

'Tools' fail as strategies to keep kids away from Net sex at libraries
Ombudsman Paul McMasters testifies before National Research Council that effort to combat 'harmful' material does more harm than good.  07.18.00

It's the 'principal' of the thing
Ombudsman One administrator takes high road in handling controversy over student newspaper; another takes wrong path by trying to squelch student expression.  07.11.00

Pinning a label on violence in media
Ombudsman Someone should be keeping track of all the proposals coming out of Congress to regulate what the rest of us can see, hear and say. It is a long and scary list.  06.23.00

Plugging a leak by puncturing freedom
Ombudsman In Washington, where information is power, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence proposes to keep secrets by jailing those who talk to the press.  06.16.00

Why a bad deal by the press is a big deal to the public
Ombudsman We've come to expect a certain amount of silliness from television news operations.  06.01.00

Playboy signal-bleed case never should have been a case
Ombudsman Perhaps only die-hard First Amendment advocates welcomed yesterday's Supreme Court ruling that Congress violated our constitutional rights in trying to regulate sex-oriented cable channels, but all of us should be outraged that this silly, costly battle had to be fought in the first place.  05.23.00

The folly of reading the mind of the reader
Ombudsman Gershon Legman was a man of great accomplishments and interests, best remembered as the blood enemy of censors and their collaborators.  05.18.00

Don't just condemn censors, confront them
Ombudsman Trying to see 'the censors' side of things' only emboldens them; librarians, schools and others charged with keeping the flame of intellectual freedom must stand up to censorship, not try to accommodate it.  05.10.00

Censorship at the source: the worst kind
Ombudsman Maximum access to government information is a fundamental right and a shared responsibility of both the press and the public.  05.02.00

Free air time for candidates carries a high price
Ombudsman 'Money … is not speech,' Justice Stephens wrote in his concurrence to the majority opinion in Nixon v. Shrink, the recent Supreme Court decision upholding a Missouri law's limits on political campaign contributions.  04.07.00

The magic of movies vs. the mind of the censor
Ombudsman It's easy to dismiss Sunday night's annual Academy Awards event as a celebration of celebrity and an exercise in hype, ego and excess. It was all that and a made-for-television ratings grab, too.  03.28.00

The silencing of a courtroom critic
Ombudsman Scott Huminski is what you might call a 'citizen-reporter.' Until a year ago, he was a constant and careful observer of court proceedings in Rutland, Vt., passing on to the public his thoughts about judges and their rulings.  03.21.00

Access and technology: Change as an excuse for closure
Ombudsman Information is the currency of democracy.  03.13.00

Surfing the Net for compulsions and addictions
Ombudsman Just when we thought we had run out of things to worry about, psychologists at Stanford and Duquesne universities last week alerted us to a new menace: hundreds of thousands of 'cybersex compulsives' wandering about the land untethered.  03.06.00

Target practice on the First Amendment
Ombudsman Remember the Juvenile Justice bill? That's the legislation that members of Congress festooned with overwrought proposals in an attempt to appear to be doing something about the high school shooting tragedy in Littleton, Colo. The bill faded from the public mind after contentious arguments broke out over gun proposals.  02.28.00

Shut up and eat everything on your plate
Ombudsman 'Free speech not only lives, it rocks!' TV talk show queen Oprah Winfrey exulted after a federal judge dismissed a multimillion lawsuit against her by Texas cattlemen outraged by remarks she and a guest made on one of her shows. That was in February 1998.  02.21.00

Forget banning books, let's burn the library
Ombudsman The library is a monument to all the best impulses in the human mind and spirit. It is a tribute to wisdom and understanding. No community is complete without one.  02.14.00

Openness, order must coexist in court
Ombudsman For two centuries, the nine justices of the Supreme Court have represented the judicial branch of our government as the president of the United States delivered the annual State of the Union address.  01.31.00

The media: bells, whistles and flashing lights
Ombudsman If you thought that news about the media couldn't get any more bizarre, you haven't been paying attention.  01.26.00

Free speech is not always just about the First Amendment
Ombudsman Atlanta Braves' pitcher John Rocker is catching a lot of flack from minority groups, the commissioner of baseball, his boss, his teammates, the mayor of New York, and just about everyone else with a conscience or a microphone. There's even a special Web site devoted to flaming Rocker.  01.11.00

First Amendment: Surviving Year 2000 challenges
Ombudsman Since the World War I era, First Amendment freedoms have been firmly internalized by our social, political and legal systems. But the eternal urge to censor speech has not been tamed. Thus, Americans pay lip service to free speech but don't trust it any further than the tips of their own tongues.  01.03.00

Press faces new year of old problems
Ombudsman Ethical lapses, adverse court decisions, public hostility, media-reform proposals threaten press's independence.  12.28.99

Why the panic over online information?
Ombudsman It's the same data already filed in other forms, but we seem willing to shut off electronic information at the drop of a hat.  12.13.99

When First Amendment principles go global
Ombudsman News media should have been better prepared to cover World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, because nothing organizes ordinary people like attempts by governments or elites to shut them up and shut them out.  12.06.99

Another community faces a Net loss in freedom
Ombudsman The Herrick District Library serves the city of Holland and the townships of Holland, Park and Laketown in Michigan. The staff and board work hard to make sure that patrons enjoy and benefit from their library experience, including accessing the Internet on the library's computers.  11.30.99

There is a price to pay for muzzling a murderer
Ombudsman 'Shut up or die' isn't the kind of choice one expects to have to make in a democratic society. But that was the choice recently presented to Aaron McKinney while on trial in Laramie, Wyo., for murdering Matthew Shepard.  11.22.99

Teaching freedom where it doesn't exist
Ombudsman NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Thirty-seven elementary and secondary teachers from Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee gathered at the First Amendment Center this past weekend for a conference designed to give them materials and training to better teach their students about the First Amendment.  11.08.99

Too often public is injured in collision of rights
Ombudsman The judicial system always seems to want something from the press and the press something from the judicial system. Seldom is either satisfied.  11.01.99

Fear and trembling over Pokemon and watch fobs
Ombudsman In ever-increasing numbers Americans are patrolling the aisles of toy stores, cruising grocery store checkout lanes, poring through schoolbooks and surfing the Net and TV in search of sex, violence and assorted other threats and insults to home and family.  10.20.99

Struggling to survive, First Amendment faces new century
Ombudsman The 'state of the First Amendment' is not good. Indeed, after more than two centuries of service to both humanity and democracy, it is locked in a struggle for survival.  10.11.99

Will we trade our freedom for civility?
Ombudsman The United States Senate Rules Committee has been debating whether to create a special committee, task force or commission on American culture. The sponsors of the proposal want to inquire into whether Hollywood entertainment is creating a violent and profane culture that threatens the morality of America's youth.  09.27.99

Are we saving the Net or censoring for dollars?
Ombudsman Earlier this month, an international media conglomerate and the Internet Content Ratings Association convened an Internet Content Summit in Munich, Germany, to present 12 recommendations for taming the rambunctious Internet. The key recommendation was for an international rating system that would enable the filtering of content.  09.20.99

Page last updated: 10/1/2013 5:09:47 PM