American Studies 360

American Journalism
and Freedom of the Press

Basic Information and Requirements, Spring 2004

Basic information

Requirements for the course

Seminar participation and presentations: Students are expected to come to class prepared to discuss the assigned readings. During the first half of the course, every student will be assigned an important Supreme Court case to present both in writing and orally. Short memos (no more than 750 words) on the key legal aspects, facts, and significance of the cases should be e-mailed to the professor by 8 p.m. the night before class. In April, students will make roughly 15-20 minute presentations of their term papers-in-progress and will be expected to teach the class about the issues and open up a general discussion about them.

Failure to attend class will be reflected in final grades.

Procedure for e-mailing memos. Please send all memos in the body of an e-mail message, not as an attachment. You may either write the memo directly into the message, or write the memo in a word processing program (MS Word) and then "copy and paste" the text into the e-mail message.

Midterm examination. This year the midterm will be conducted as an in-class exam during the second half of the day's class on March 9.

Term papers: Students are encouraged to write their term papers around one of the following topics (but another subject is possible, if you make a case for it):

privacy versus the First Amendment;
sensationalism and libel;
campaign finance reform versus the First Amendment;
commercial interests (commercial speech, corporate speech, intellectual property, media ownership) and free expression and access to the media;
obscenity and pornography;
violent speech, hate speech, and "political correctness"; and
war, terrorism, and freedom of the press.

The papers may be organized around a specific case or controversy or deal more generally with a problem. ideally, you should provide a historical and cultural context for understanding a contemporary conflict over free expression in America. The length of the papers should be between 3,500 and 5,000 words.

The initial deadline for paper topics is March 2. By that date, you should submit a one-paragraph description of the topic you want to write about. If your class presentation comes relatively early in April, you will need to get to work on the paper earlier, but some allowance will be made for the earlier timetable you face.

Final papers are due 5 p.m., Friday, May 7.

Procedure for e-mailing papers. You may hand in your papers either in hard copy or electronically. If handing in hard copy, please leave the paper in my box in the Sociology Department mail room in Wallace Hall. If e-mailing, you should send the paper as an attachment because of footnotes and formatting that would otherwise be lost. Please use MS Word from an IBM-compatible computer.

Grading

Books and other readings

Books will be available for purchase at the University Store. You should get the readings for the first class as soon as possible. Randall Bezanson's How Free Can the Press Be? is already available at the U-Store. Although my own book, The Creation of the Media, goes to press in January, it is unclear whether sufficient copies will be available by early February (the official publication date is in April). Consequently, at our first meeting, I may need to provide xeroxed copies of relevant chapters for at least the following week.

All readings will also be available at Firestone. Wherever possible, I have tried to use materials that are available for free on the Web or through electronic reserves; as a result, there is no course packet for purchase this year. When you see before a reading on the (online) syllabus, that means you can just click through to it from whatever computer on campus you are using, and either read it directly on the screen or print it out. When you see before a reading, you can find it in Electronic Reserves, Blackboard course documents, or (if it is a court decision) Lexis. To get court decisions, go to Lexis (which you can access only inside the university or through another licensed account), click on "Legal Research," then "Get a Case," and enter the appropriate information.