In determining the news that’s fit to print, U.S. courts have traditionally declined to second-guess professional journalists. But in an age when news, entertainment, and new media outlets are constantly pushing the envelope of acceptable content, the consensus over press freedoms is eroding. The First Amendment Bubble examines how unbridled media are endangering the constitutional privileges journalists gained in the past century.

For decades, judges have generally affirmed that individual privacy takes a back seat to the public’s right to know. But the growth of the Internet and the resulting market pressures on traditional journalism have made it ever harder to distinguish public from private, news from titillation, journalists from provocateurs. Is a television program that outs criminals or a website that posts salacious videos entitled to First Amendment protections based on newsworthiness? U.S. courts are increasingly inclined to answer no, demonstrating new resolve in protecting individuals from invasive media scrutiny and enforcing their own sense of the proper boundaries of news.

This judicial backlash now extends beyond ethically dubious purveyors of infotainment, to mainstream journalists, who are seeing their ability to investigate crime and corruption curtailed. Yet many—heedless of judicial demands for accountability—continue to push for ever broader constitutional privileges. In so doing, Amy Gajda warns, they may be creating a First Amendment bubble that will rupture in the courts, with disastrous consequences for conventional news.

• discusses information law as part of a continuum of interrelated issues rather than an assortment of discrete topics;
• examines information law in the context of different types of libraries;
• delves into the manifold legal issues raised when interacting with patrons and communities, from intellectual freedom topics like censorship and public activities in the library to the legal issues surrounding materials and information access;
• elucidates operational and management legal issues, including library security, interacting with law enforcement, advocacy, lobbying, funding, human resources, and liability;
• promotes literacy of the law, its structures, and its terminology as a professional skill;
• gives readers the tools to find and understand different sources of legal authority and demonstrates how to interpret them when they conflict; and
• explores information law as a national and cross-national issue.

The American founders did not endorse a citizen’s right to know. More openness in government, more frankness in a doctor’s communication with patients, more disclosure in a food manufacturer’s package labeling, and more public notice of actions that might damage the environment emerged in our own time.

As Michael Schudson shows in The Rise of the Right to Know, modern transparency dates to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—well before the Internet—as reform-oriented politicians, journalists, watchdog groups, and social movements won new leverage. At the same time, the rapid growth of higher education after 1945, together with its expansive ethos of inquiry and criticism, fostered both insight and oversight as public values.

“One of the many strengths of The Rise of the Right To Know is its insistent emphasis on culture and its interaction with law…What Schudson shows is that enforceable access to official information creates a momentum towards a better use of what is disclosed and a refinement of how disclosure is best done.”
—George Brock, Times Literary Supplement

“This book is a reminder that the right to know is not an automatic right. It was hard-won, and fought for by many unknown political soldiers.”
—Monica Horten, LSE Review of Books