In Saving the News, Martha Minow takes stock of the new media landscape. As Minow shows, the First Amendment of the US Constitution assumes the existence and durability of a private industry. Although the First Amendment does not govern the conduct of entirely private enterprises, nothing in the Constitution forecloses government action to regulate concentrated economic power, to require disclosure of who is financing communications, or to support news initiatives where there are market failures. Moreover, the federal government has contributed financial resources, laws, and regulations to develop and shape media in the United States. Thus, Minow argues that the transformation of media from printing presses to the internet was shaped by deliberate government policies that influenced the direction of private enterprise. In short, the government has crafted the direction and contours of America's media ecosystem.
Building upon this basic argument, Minow outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the media, policing fraud, and more robust funding of public media. As she stresses, such reforms are the kinds of initiatives needed if the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press continues to hold meaning in the twenty-first century.
The potential power of forgiveness in an age of resentment.
Crimes and violations of the law require punishment, and our legal system is set up to punish, but what if the system was recalibrated to also weigh grounds for forgiveness? What if something like bankruptcy-a fresh start for debtors-were available to people convicted of crimes? Martha Minow explores the complicated intersection of the law, justice, and forgiveness, asking whether the law should encourage people to forgive, and when courts, public officials, and specific laws should forgive.
Who has the right to forgive? Who should be forgiven? And under what terms? Minow tackles these foundational issues by exploring three questions:
- What does the international response to child soldiers teach us about the legal treatment of juvenile offenders in the US?
- Why are the laws surrounding corporate debt more forgiving than those governing American student and consumer debt, and sovereign debt in the developing world?
- When do law's tools of forgiveness, amnesties, and pardons strengthen justice, peace, and democracy (think South Africa), and when do they undermine law's promise of fairness (think Joe Arpaio)?
