A shelf
The Press
Areopagitica
The first great defense of a free press in English, written against a law requiring books to be licensed before printing. Let truth and falsehood grapple,...
On Liberty
The clearest defense ever written of the freedom to be wrong. Mill's harm principle holds that the only ground for using power against a person is...
Public Opinion
The founding text of media criticism, and it reads like a description of this morning. Lippmann asked how the public can possibly know enough to govern...
Propaganda
The manual, written without a trace of irony by the man who built the public relations industry. Bernays argued that the conscious manipulation of the masses...
Politics and the English Language
Six rules and one argument: that clear writing is a civic act, because vague and ugly language exists to hide what power is actually doing. Orwell...
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Postman's warning that the danger was never Orwell's boot but Huxley's pleasure: that television was quietly reshaping public life into entertainment, and a public trained to...
Understanding Media
The medium is the message, compressed into four words that still organize every argument about technology. McLuhan's claim is that the tools we use to communicate...
Make No Law
The case that built modern free-press protection, told by the reporter who understood it best. New York Times v. Sullivan held that public figures cannot win...
Personal History
Watergate and the Pentagon Papers from inside the Washington Post, told by the publisher who had to decide whether to print and risk the paper's survival....
The Pentagon Papers and New York Times v. United States
Prior restraint defeated, at the highest stakes the press lens reaches. When the government tried to stop newspapers from publishing a secret history of the Vietnam...
Southern Horrors and The Red Record
Investigative journalism as a weapon against terror, when almost no one else would name the crime. Wells documented lynching with names, dates, and numbers, refusing the...
The Constitution of Knowledge
A defense of the institutions that turn disagreement into shared truth, the press, the academy, the courts, the professions, and an account of the forces now...