As predicted, the much-maligned Citizens United Supreme Court decision helped unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in unlimited campaign spending in the 2012 election, much of it in support of former Michigan Gov. Mitt Romney and Republican Senate candidates. But contrary to expectations, the money almost entirely failed to elect candidates it supported.
The First Amendment is less important today as control of speech passes to private “benevolent dictatorships” such as Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a century ago that free speech didn’t protect a person “falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” Now some news commentators are dusting off that memorable aphorism to suggest that the offensive film, “Innocence of the Muslims,” is not protected by the First Amendment.
One of the most repeated pieces of conventional wisdom about the lead up to the war in Iraq is that the press served as a cheerleader for the invasion, buying into the Bush administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction and connections between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. This view is embraced so fervently in academia that it seldom is questioned.
Ninety-nine years after Daniel R. Fitzpatrick became the editorial cartoonist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that proud history of.