“Private War”: The Problem of Access
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Description
Contrary to the preferred platitudes, war is as likely to defeat as to create a sense of public unity. The recent experience of the United States in Vietnam is but one example of the phenomenon. A government, faced on the one hand with the exigencies of battle and on the other with the disruptive threat of dissidence, is easily tempted by the possibility that a resort to regulation of speech and press will foster the desired climate of public support. American history, despite laws protecting free speech, is rife with instances of such attempts at control. During the Civil War, thousands of civilians were imprisoned by Union military authorities for protesting against the draft and voicing opposition to the goals and conduct of the war. Newspapers were also closed down on several occasions for rhetoric deemed harmful to the national interest. General Burnside, for example, suspended publication of the Chicago Times in 1864; the paper was suppressed for three days until President Lincoln countermanded the order. World War I presented further similar temptations. The Espionage Act of 1917, and equivalent statutes passed by the various states, led to a flurry of prosecutions for “inconvenient” speech—including such alarming silliness as finding it criminal to criticize the Red Cross. Modern First Amendment theory, which imposes strict limits on the power of government to prevent or to punish the speech of even its most outrageous critics, had its genesis in the regulatory excesses of that period in American history. Direct censorship is a serious interference with the timing and form in which information is revealed. But it offers the faint consolation that the censored material will not be lost forever; eventually, opinions and reports which have been suppressed or altered may filter out in their original forms into the stream of public debate. But a second form of control to which governments may resort during times of national emergency does not even offer that mild solace because it is designed to cut off the access of the press and the public to the basic sources of the information. This variant of the speech regulation problem surfaced recently in the United States during the brief war on the Caribbean island of Grenada.
Source Publication
Free Speech and National Security
Source Editors/Authors
Shimon Shetreet
Publication Date
1991
Recommended Citation
Zimmerman, Diane L., "“Private War”: The Problem of Access" (1991). Faculty Chapters. 1457.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1457
