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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

Speech police — on the left and right — trample freedom of expression in the name of virtue
Ombudsman David Lowenthal, professor emeritus of political science at Boston College, offered an argument for censorship of the entertainment media in an article recently published in The Weekly Standard. Lowenthal is inspired by two convictions: That Hollywood is dishing out too much sex and violence and that we consumers like it too much for our own good.  09.08.99

A little less churn in the press pool, please
Ombudsman Sydney H. Schanberg is one of the nation's journalistic treasures. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the fall of Cambodia in 1975. He has distinguished himself in the reporting craft at The New York Times and Newsday. He has fought fiercely for press freedom. His work and his integrity stand as a caution to indiscriminate bashers of the press.  08.30.99

Crime on campus: What colleges won't tell you
Ombudsman In the next few weeks, 10.4 million students will be settling in on the nation's college and university campuses. They look forward to learning, maturing, perhaps partying a little. Some will be more prepared than others for this academic adventure, but very few will be prepared for the amount and nature of crime they will encounter on those campuses.  08.23.99

Fear of freedom puts First Amendment at risk
Ombudsman There are among us self-appointed and self-anointed guardians of culture and morality who believe that the rest of us have too much freedom. In their insistent opinion, our culture is too coarse, our speech too uncivil, our tastes too crude.  08.16.99

People think press too free; government only too happy to make it less so
Ombudsman To the amazement of people living elsewhere, the majority of Americans think that our press is too free. More ominously, a goodly number of police, judges and political leaders who should know better pander to that attitude by harassing journalists and restricting their efforts to keep the public apprised of what the officials are up to.  08.09.99

Hollywood: the power and the evil
Ombudsman All eyes turn to Hollywood these days in search of both blame and remedy for whatever ails us at the moment.  07.26.99

Zoning out the First Amendment
Ombudsman The First Amendment often frustrates the efforts of local government officials to punish adult businesses.  07.19.99

Dr. Laura: Wronging our rights in the library
Ombudsman While radio talk host Dr. Laura Schlessinger complains about online porn and pedophilia, the librarians she blames carefully craft acceptable Internet-use policies and provide a tap on the shoulder to those who don't adhere.  07.12.99

Notwithstanding the Constitution ...
Ombudsman Here's the game politicians are playing with First Amendment freedoms: When problems prove hard to solve, outlaw offending speech so it looks like we're doing something.  07.06.99

State of the First Amendment:A survey of public attitudes
Ombudsman Most Americans celebrate the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Yet they are not entirely comfortable with those freedoms. They are constantly reevaluating their commitment to First Amendment rights and values and rearranging their priorities, asking themselves whether life would be more civil, more orderly, less threatening if the excesses of expression were somehow subdued.  07.02.99

Toying with free speech
Ombudsman Washington Redskins fullback John Riggins raised a few eyebrows several years ago when he told Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor at some Washington gala, Come on, Sandy baby, loosen up.  06.28.99

When judges keep press at bay, the public is thereal loser
Ombudsman Last week, a federal court of appeals in California issued an opinion that might be characterized fairly as a footnote in the infamous Unabomber case.  06.14.99

Unlearning liberty: children in democratic limbo
Ombudsman The concept of freedom is becoming largely academic in the nation's schools.  06.07.99

Testimony before the House Commerce Subcommittee on Health and Environment
Ombudsman Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee. My name is Paul McMasters. I am here today testifying on behalf of the American Society of Newspapers Editors as a member of that organization's Freedom of Information Committee.  05.26.99

Murder by the book: Free speech takes a hit
Ombudsman Publisher's decision to settle in murder case involving Hit Man murder manual demonstrates how vulnerable formerly unassailable speech has become.  05.24.99

V-chipping away at your TV choices
Ombudsman We move ever closer to the day when the government will be watching ever more closely what you watch on television.  05.17.99

Blaming media for social ills: convenient excuse
Ombudsman There is a saying among lawyers that bad facts make bad law. In its $25 million verdict against a tabloid TV show on May 7, a Michigan jury added a corollary: "Bad television makes terrible law."  05.10.99

Tough choice: journalist or jailbird
Ombudsman It's one thing to defend journalistic freedom and independence with bombast and rhetoric; quite another to surrender personal freedom and independence in a jail cell.  05.03.99

Journalists can't be cops, too
Ombudsman Several Michigan newspapers and television stations aren't faring very well in a struggle to preserve their independence from law enforcement.  04.16.99

When privacy and press rights collide
Ombudsman The facts around it have grown fuzzy and faded with the passage of 30 years but the singular image is as sharp today as it was the night it was imprinted in my memory.  03.29.99

Honoring Madison's constitutional legacy
Ombudsman On the map, the road wending through Virginia's beautiful Piedmont region is Highway 20.  03.22.99

National FOI Day: Access is the key to good government
Ombudsman Tomorrow is the birthday of James Madison, who labored to embed the principle of an informed citizenry in our civic compact. That is why across this nation, in ways large and small, March 16 is observed as National Freedom of Information Day.  03.15.99

Why the Starr 'muzzle' on Monica telling the full story?
Ombudsman Something like 70 million people not yet afflicted with scandal fatigue tuned in to watch Barbara Walter's two-hour interview with Monica Lewinsky Wednesday. And as entertained and titillated as they may have been, they did not get the whole story.  03.08.99

Scandalmania: The press just can't help itself
Ombudsman How did Juanita Broaddrick's accusation that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her in a Little Rock hotel in the spring of 1978 wind up on the front pages of mainstream newspapers 21 years later?  03.01.99

'Broadcasters not tending to their free-speech interests'
Ombudsman Broadcasters not tending to their free-speech interests  02.25.99

Exorcising the demons of television
Ombudsman Our night terrors from things that go bump on the television screen continue. Recent dispatches from the cultural wars:  02.22.99

When it comes to chemical threats, ignorance just isn't bliss
Ombudsman Forty million men, women and children in the United States live in the shadow of 66,000 plants harboring chemicals that could kill or maim indiscriminately if they escaped into the air we breathe.  02.15.99

Trampling freedom in a cyberpanic
Ombudsman It often appears that the nation's newspapers are peering into cyberspace through the wrong end of a telescope. In such an inverted view of the online world, where vagrant bits and pieces and bright flashes are made more ominous by distance, a cyberpanic sets in. The Internet looms in the lens as more threat than promise.  02.09.99

Fear of sex translates into laws on what we can say and show
Ombudsman Food can cause problems, too, but you don't see laws proposed to restrict pictures of food online.  02.01.99

Senate fiddles in secret while public burns
Ombudsman A good part of the reason most of us remember that riveting and remarkable 1990 public television series  01.25.99

Nuremberg Files anti-abortion site: Free speech or hit list?
Ombudsman Where does free speech stop and a hit list begin?  01.19.99

Must a civil society be a censored society?
Ombudsman More than one year has passed, and we have yet to shake the image of Matthew Shepard pistol-whipped and strung up to die on a Wyoming rail fence because he was gay.  01.17.99

The 'it's out there' beat: This time, restraint defeats rumor
Ombudsman The good news is that the American mainstream press thus far has shown admirable restraint in not making public the latest, apparently unfounded, rumor about alleged pre-presidential sex-capades  01.11.99

Libel: Subtle censor of the press
Ombudsman Two federal appeals courts went their separate ways in recent high-profile libel cases, proving once again that what the legal world considers settled law is anything but that to the press and the public.  01.04.99

Journalism educators need to get passionate about First Amendment freedoms and responsibilities — on-campus and off
Ombudsman Journalism educators are the ones who mold the minds and create the credentials of the journalists who determine what we read in our newspapers and view and hear in our newscasts.  12.28.98

Press at its best — or just documenting dirt?
Ombudsman Porn publisher Larry Flynt finally got fed up with the mainstream press horning in on his franchise.  12.21.98

Few will note 207th birthday of our five fundamental freedoms, even though each is under attack
Ombudsman A precious few will take note of today's 207th birthday of the First Amendment.  12.15.98

Fight over free press at Univ. of Rhode Island puts a lot on the line
Ombudsman More than two decades ago, the student newspaper on the campus of the University of Rhode Island suffered an identity crisis and wound up changing its name from The Beacon to The Good 5 Cent Cigar.  12.14.98

Tough times at 'Free Speech High:' School administrators teaching dismalFirst Amendment lessons
Ombudsman For just a taste of the dismal state of free expression for the nation's young people, consider last week's story of the Phoenix high school student who tried to publish his own newspaper and wound up in the headlines himself.  12.07.98

Reducing free speech's Net worth
Ombudsman The Commonwealth of Virginia seems to be awash in Internet ironies right now.  12.01.98

Media's prime-time crime spree hides real statistics — violence in U.S. is down
Ombudsman Violent crime declined for the sixth year in a row and now is at its lowest rate since 1987, according to a report released this weekend by the Justice Department. Big news story, right? Well, not quite.  11.23.98

Censorship: It's in our genes
Ombudsman The human being arrived in this world with three basic instincts: the urge to hunt and gather food, the urge to procreate, and the urge to censor.  11.16.98

Sooner or later, Hollywood offends us all
Ombudsman "The Siege" opened this weekend under siege from Arab-Americans offended by the movie's characterization of their religion and culture. Groups planned to picket and distribute leaflets at a number of theaters.  11.09.98

Citizens get short shrift from officials on public information
Ombudsman After the votes are counted in precincts across the nation tomorrow, the pundits and politicians will no doubt decry poor voter turnout and blame it on poor citizenship.  11.02.98

Books and movies as natural born killers
Ombudsman There are no limits to the limits on free expression if publishers, broadcasters and the producers can be held responsible for crimes of those who try to avoid responsibility by saying a book, movie or music made me do it.  10.26.98

Shackling the world's press with good intentions
Ombudsman Press councils, universal ethics codes sound good but just provide excuses to restrict media at a time when we need more press freedom, not less.  10.19.98

Waving the flag vs. saving free speech
Ombudsman Little-noticed constitutional crisis gone for now - but will return.  10.12.98

High crimes and misdemeanors in the press
Ombudsman Some journalists covering the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal are unindicted co-conspirators in the impeachment of their own credibility.  10.05.98

Book-burning mentality sears society's soul
Ombudsman In the movie "City of Angels," the angels' home away from heaven is not a church or sanctuary but a library.  09.28.98

When privacy is paramount, is democracy in danger?
Ombudsman This morning, we endured the breach of yet another barrier to the private and confidential as various media began streaming to us four hours of unedited and unexamined grand jury testimony by President Clinton.  09.21.98

Page last updated: 10/2/2013 7:26:07 AM