Fear in the Air; Broadcasting and the First Amendment: The Anatomy of a Constitutional Crisis

The format is approximately 5.5 inches by 8.5 inches. 180, [4] pages. Ex-library with the usual markings. The dust jacket has a taped marking at the bottom of the spine. Harry Scott Ashmore (July 28, 1916-January 20, 1998) was an American journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials in 1957 on the school integration conflict in Little Rock. Ashmore won a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1941. When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Ashmore left Harvard to join the United States Army, and served (reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel) with the Ninety-fifth Infantry Division, United States Third Army. After the war, Harry Ashmore became the editorial writer at the Charlotte News (in Charlotte, North Carolina). In 1951 Governor Sid McMath of Arkansas invited Ashmore to address the Southern Governors' Conference when it met at Hot Springs, Arkansas. Ashmore spoke to the governors on civil rights, a contentious subject in southern states, and newspapers around the United States reprinted the speech or excerpts from it. Ashmore wrote the first of his eleven books in 1954. The Negro and the Schools was a report of a Ford Foundation study of segregated education in the South. It was published shortly before the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision ending school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Chief Justice Earl Warren later told Ashmore that the book was used as a source while drafting the 1955 implementation ruling known as Brown II. In 1958, Harry Ashmore won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. In 1959 Ashmore left the Arkansas Gazette and moved to Santa Barbara, California, where he joined the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. He served as President of the Center from 1969 to 1974. He also served as the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica from 1960 until 1963, and afterwards as Director of Editorial Research. Ashmore received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award for 1995-1996. In his foundational opus, Harry Ashmore posited that the real stresses on the First Amendment (circa 1970) were the product of technological and social change, not presidential pique. This is the thesis developed in this book. Ashmore notes that the media were able to rally no effective popular support when the Nixon White House launched a pincers movement aimed at intimidating the broadcast industry--manipulation of federal licensing powers to exploit internal conflicts between the networks and their member stations, while generating external pressure from interest groups disaffected with prevailing TV treatment of news and public affairs. The dimensions and the implications of this controversy are set forth in the words of key figures from the Nixon Administration, the network news operations, the station owners, and the regulatory agencies, including a select group who gathered with the resident social critics at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions for a free-style conference on the subject of broadcasting and the First Amendment. Ashmore weaves these revealing exchanges into his own incisive analysis of the acute new legal and political issues that have arisen with the technological revolution in communications. This book traces the alterations of First Amendment theory under the impact of licensed broadcasting; defines the new issues arising out of the presidential challenge to journalism's historic adversary role, and the rising populist demand for right of access to communications channels; spells out the inadequacy of formal regulations by the federal Communications Commission, and of self-regulation bounded only by marketplace considerations, considers the possible alternative of surveillance by a nongovernment National News Council; and recounts the stormy effort to augment commercial broadcasting with a public-service network.…