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Freedom of speech : mightier than the sword PDF

306 Pages·2015·3.09 MB·English
by  Shipler
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Praise for David K. Shipler’s Freedom of Speech “Shipler writes with crisp, concise earnestness….This book is a pleasure to read both for Shipler’s skill but also because he tells the stories of people bound up in these issues.” —Providence Journal “[Shipler] gets it: The First Amendment is only a starting point. Free expression is a noble ideal that creates continual tension in our society….Shipler’s view of America’s free speech landscape is nuanced and complex. Yes, people say awful things, and sometimes seek to squelch expression with which they disagree. But in his book, good ideas and sentiments hold their own against bad and offensive ones.” —The Progressive “Chilling….For Shipler, it’s essential that we find a middle ground where we can hear one another, where we can debate and disagree with respect….We must participate in the conversation about who we are and who we want to be. That it is unruly, disturbing, scary even, goes without saying; this is also why it’s necessary.” —Los Angeles Times “By providing intimate portraits of the lives of those who dare to speak against the odds, Shipler enables us to see the human element behind free expression….Shipler pricks the conscience of readers who refrain from telling the truth, or whose selective listening has lead them to disrespect and delegitimize those with whom they disagree.” —National Catholic Reporter “Good stories, great interviews, and a potent plea on behalf of vigilant listening.” —Kirkus Reviews “A broad and deep look at free speech….A fascinating look at one of our fundamental rights.” —Booklist “David Shipler reminds us in this important book that sometimes we have to listen to things we don’t want to hear. But without freedom of speech, there can be no dialogue, and without dialogue, there can be no democracy. Freedom of Speech is a glorious celebration of its own subject!” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed “At a time when the First Amendment is under siege as never before in our lifetimes, David Shipler, one of the nation’s great journalists, reminds us what we are in danger of losing. His terrific, timely new book, Freedom of Speech: Mightier Than the Sword, takes us on a tour—sometimes shocking, often infuriating, always enlightening—of America’s free-speech battlefields.” —Philip Shenon, author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination “Shipler tells real, often Orwellian stories of ordinary people—government workers, teachers, librarians, and playwrights—who risk everything to push the free-speech envelope, while challenging us to consider difficult cases when money buys speech and poverty promotes silence. At a time when many civil libertarians despair at the loss of freedom and privacy on so many fronts, Freedom of Speech reveals conflicts that must be understood if free speech is to prevail.” —Barbara Jones, former director, American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom “The freedom of speech enjoyed by American citizens is unique in all the world. In this brilliantly insightful and incisive book, David Shipler explores the many and varied facets of our nation’s complex, extraordinary, and fascinating relationship with our most precious freedom.” —Geoffrey R. Stone, author of Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime David K. Shipler Freedom of Speech David K. Shipler reported for The New York Times from 1966 to 1988 in New York, Saigon, Moscow, Jerusalem, and Washington, D.C. He is the author of six previous books, including the bestsellers Russia and The Working Poor, as well as Arab and Jew, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and has taught at Princeton, American University, and Dartmouth. He writes online at The Shipler Report. shiplerreport.​blogspot.​com ALSO BY DAVID K. SHIPLER Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties The Working Poor: Invisible in America A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2016 Copyright © 2015, 2016 by David K. Shipler Living Trust All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2015. Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Graham Swift: Excerpts from Waterland, copyright © 1983 by Graham Swift. Reprint by permission of Graham Swift. Caryl Churchill: Excerpts from Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, copyright © 2009 by Caryl Churchill. Reprinted by permission of Caryl Churchill. Ari Roth and Theater J: Excerpt from the program notes for Andy and the Shadows, 2013. Reprinted by permission of Ari Roth and Theater J. The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Shipler, David K. Freedom of speech : mightier than the sword / David K. Shipler. pages cm 1. Freedom of speech—United States. 2. United States. Constitution. 1st Amendment. I. Title. KF4772.s55 2015 323.44′30973—DC23 2014032127 Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780307947611 eBook ISBN 9781101874691 Author photograph © Deborah I. Shipler Cover design by Chip Kidd Cover photograph © Ann Little / Alamy www.​vintagebooks.​com v4.1 a FOR THE THREE GENERATIONS: Debby Jonathan, Glynis, Laura, Matt, Michael, and Sweta Madison, Ethan, Benjamin, Kalpana, Dylan, and Priya Contents Cover About the Author Also by David K. Shipler Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction The Landscape: Zones of Silence, Zones of Speech PART I Books 1. Trouble in River City 2. The Discerning Audience 3. Fear of Reading PART II Secrets 4. The Loneliness of Thomas Tamm 5. Thomas Drake and Friends 6. The New War Correspondents PART III Stereotypes 7. The Cultural Limits of Bigotry 8. The Protocols of the Elders of Islam PART IV Politics 9. Money Is Speech, Poverty Is Silence 10. True Believers PART V Plays 11. Red Lines and Black Lists 12. Post-traumatic Syndrome of Another Kind 13. The Drama Behind the Drama Afterword and Acknowledgments Notes Introduction The listener is everything in telling a story. —CHAYA ROTH F reedom of speech implies the freedom to hear. Without willing listeners, brilliant thinkers cannot educate, brave orators cannot mobilize, daring leakers cannot reform. The unseen play, the unread book, the ignored appeal, fall silently away. The unheard lament flutters and fails. So ideas do not have to be censored to die. Soviet dissidents used to say they were “writing for the drawer,” where manuscripts were forced to lie in darkness. But in today’s flagrantly open America, unwelcome facts and opinions disappear in other ways. They are concealed in the confusing clatter of argument. They are hidden by a lack of funding. They are confined to enclaves of narrow interests. It may be that political debate in the United States has never been as boisterous, irreverent, and downright nasty as in the early twenty-first century. Yet speakers and audiences are not all listening seriously to one another. They assemble in a public square that is honeycombed with comfort zones where citizens cluster around the viewpoints that suit them, separated by soundproof barriers of disagreement. Many Americans do not want to consider what is being said beyond their walls. Antonin Scalia, the conservative Supreme Court justice, made the point when he told a New York magazine interviewer that his preferred newspapers were the conservative Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal. He didn’t read The New York Times and had canceled his subscription to The Washington Post because of “the treatment of almost any conservative issue,” he said. “It was slanted and often nasty. And, you know, why should I get upset every morning? I don’t think I’m the only one. I think they lost subscriptions partly because they became so shrilly, shrilly liberal.” The balkanization is facilitated by transformed demographics and moral values that leave some groups, especially white conservatives, with a novel sense of alienation from the mainstream. Those who want certain books out of classrooms feel marginalized and disempowered by school systems. Those

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A provocative, timely assessment of the state of free speech in America With his best seller The Working Poor, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times veteran David K. Shipler cemented his place among our most trenchant social commentators. Now he turns his incisive reporting to a critical A
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