I get asked a lot about my views on WikiLeaks these days. A lot. By all kinds of people. I work in a mass communication field and have been known to teach a little journalism, so it’s natural I get this kind of thing.

Normally I have a quick answer to those  “what do you think about X?” kinds of questions. WikiLeaks is more of a struggle. I’ve written and re-written this post more than a few times and can’t seem to get at the kernel of this thing because it’s extraordinarily complex. It deals with all kinds of issues: free speech, power structures, definitions of terrorism and espionage, personality-driven media, the open Web, and journalistic ethics, to name a few.

Part of my struggle is I don’t know what to make of Julian Assange, the site’s founder. He’s a bit of a self-promoter and seems to oversell the explosiveness of each document dump. He may or may not be a sexual predator depending on how much you trust charges from a government already enraged by his actions. He might have a little narcissism in him. I just don’t know what to do with the guy.

But personality is just that. Many of our big heroes in areas of free expression were imperfect. John Milton wrote Aereopagitica, the most breathtaking defense of free speech ever conceived, and yet he didn’t think such rights should belong to Catholics. Thomas Jefferson had wonderful things to say about a free press, but his views on freedom didn’t extend to women or African slaves. And I won’t get into Larry Flynt, who has pushed the cause of free speech in vast ways during my lifetime but publishes pornography for a living. Read more

Liberty Tree planting ceremony at Lehigh University in October 2009.

There’s a small tree to the left of the door outside Coppee Hall, my home building at Lehigh University. We call it the Liberty Tree, and it’s been there almost a year now. Kathy Olson, one of my journalism colleagues, worked hard to bring Ken Paulson and the Freedom Forum to campus last October to celebrate Lehigh’s commitment to the First Amendment.

I see the tree every day (it’s blooming better than the picture at the right, thankfully!). It reminds me of why I do what I do, and why free expression is so vital to a country that strives to model free democracy to the world.

We even had signs we passed out and planted saying, “I support free expression.”

I have been teaching long enough, though, to know that supporting something doesn’t really take hold until a person is confronted with it. In my Media & Society class last spring, for example, we got into a pretty spirited debate over whether the KKK has a right to peacefully march through town and air their hateful views.

I believe that nobody really understands what it means to support free expression until they have to articulate why a group they strongly dislike has the right to speak freely. That means being in a position where they have to defend the right to speak of a person with whom they disagree, sometimes even vehemently. The test of free speech is not whether we have that right in our laws, or even whether we use it. No, the test is whether we allow our political and ideological enemies to enjoy the same right. Read more

Barack Obama’s decision to release Bush administration memos that argue for the justification of torture techniques has been all over the news. Something else has raised a bit of ruckus in journalism academia circles, and that is Mike Allen’s account for Politico on how the decision was made.

Allen wrote a fairly short piece that led with the news that Obama consulted a wide range of sources before making his decision. In the fifth paragraph of this eight-paragraph story, Allen chose to “balance” the piece with anonymous quotes from a former Bush staffer who railed against the decision. The staffer accused the administration of putting America in danger, a fairly weighty claim. Read more

We’re going through free speech stuff in JOUR 1100 this week, and Hans Meyer’s recent post about a court decision regarding free speech and the Net got me thinking a little bit.

I’d recommend reading the story and Hans’ post, because the combination of the two raise serious concerns about what happens when courts force site operators to release the names of contributors in cases of libel.

The thing I’m thinking about in the wake of this decision is that it’s really time for us to step back and think about what it means to associate online. This is really the heart of my dissertation, because we don’t think enough about what it means to talk together in online formats. Read more

Well, we aren’t into full interactivity mode with the White House web site, but America at least got out of the early 1990s with a new feature the Obama adminstration added to WhiteHouse.gov.

Obama promised in the 2008 campaign to allow for public comment on legislation sent to his desk. This weekend we got a look at how it’ll happen, as the White House provided a link for citizens to share public comment on the economic recovery bill.

Granted, it’s one way communication. People can type in their thoughts and send it on to whoever’s reading everything (assuming they are; I harbor no illusions that it might not be going into a server landfill somewhere), but there is no talk of getting a reply back or even the ability to see what others are saying. Read more