Author Archive | Victoria Ekstrand

UNC Media Law Ph.D. Students Win Top Awards at AEJMC 2018

By on September 2, 2018 in Center for Media Law and Policy

Our media law graduate students made an unprecedented showing at the nation’s premier journalism educators conference in Washington, D.C., in August.

Dr. Brooks Fuller, a 2018 Ph.D. graduate of the UNC School of Media and Journalism, and now an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, won the Nafziger-White-Salwen Dissertation Award at the 2018 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Annual Conference. Fourth-year Ph.D. students Shao Chengyuan and Kriste Patrow won First Place Student Paper awards in the AEJMC Mass Communication & Society and Law & Policy Divisions, respectively.

The Nafziger-White-Salwen Dissertation Award is the highest honor bestowed on student scholarship, recognizing the “best dissertation in the field of mass communication research” as judged by AEJMC’s Research Committee and top scholars. This is not the first time that our media law graduates have received this prestigious award. In 2012, our former Ph.D. graduate Dr. Dean Smith, now an assistant professor at High Point University, also won the award. Both dissertations were chaired by Dr. Cathy Packer, former co-director of the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy.

Brooks Fuller headshotFuller’s dissertation titled, “Words, Wounds, and Relationships: a Mixed-Method Study of Free Speech and Harm in High-Conflict Environments,” uses qualitative field methods to examine high-conflict political protests, such as abortion clinic protests, where free speech is truly tested. Fuller’s ethnographic field project highlights core First Amendment doctrines such as true threats and incitement and how they are applied by federal courts. Instead of purported threats, harassment, and violence, Fuller’s research revealed a complex web of social relationships at the clinics, largely influenced by how different stakeholders interpreted speech in these high-conflict environments. His work was designed to help inform courts as these harmful speech doctrines develop. UNC Media and Journalism School faculty Dr. Michael Hoefges and Dr. Tori Smith Ekstrand also served on Fuller’s committee, as well as Dr. George Noblit from the UNC Department of Sociology and Professor Bill Marshall from the UNC School of Law.

Fourth-year Ph.D .student and Park Fellow Kriste Patrow won the First Place Student Paper Award from the Media Law and Policy Division of AEJMC for her paper, “‘Walk’ This Way, Talk This Way: How Do We Know When the Government is Speaking After Walker v. Texas?” Patrow’s paper examines confusion surrounding the government speech doctrine. She analyzed six U.S. Supreme Court cases in which the Court was tasked with determining when a reasonable person would understand a message to be from the government. The analysis revealed ways to anchor the reasonable observer prong of the test, by requiring that there be a main cognizable message and that the government self-identify as speaker.

Fourth-year Ph.D. student Shao Chengyuan received the First Place Student Paper Award from the Mass Communication and Society Division of AEJMC. Her paper, “Asian International Students’ Mass Media Use and Acculturation Strategies,” highlights the important role of mass media use before students relocate. The paper also examines students’ cultural knowledge of American society. The paper is co-authored with doctoral student Lin Li from Michigan State University’s Department of Media and Information.

Congratulations to our Ph.D. students!

0

Free Speech Assumptions and the Case of Netflix

By on December 13, 2013 in First Amendment, Internet, Journalism
From left to right: Haben Girma, Harvard Law graduate; Elizabeth Ekstrand, daughter of the author; Victoria Ekstrand, UNC asst. professor; and Katie Savage, president of Advocates for Carolina.

From left to right: Haben Girma, Harvard Law graduate; Elizabeth Ekstrand, daughter of the author; Victoria Ekstrand, UNC asst. professor; and Katie Savage, president of Advocates for Carolina.

There are two (among many) huge assumptions we make when we speak of a right to free speech or free expression.

The first assumption is that such speech can actually be formed.

The second is that such speech will be heard.

For the disabled, neither assumption is a given.  The disabled who can speak are often not heard. Their voices are either lost in a crowded marketplace focused on elite influencers or their speech is lacking or misunderstood because of the nature of their disability.

How then do we conceptualize a right of free speech for the disabled? Can we think about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in connection with a right of free expression? Do we have any case law that might lead us to consider such a connection? (The short answer to this last question, I think, is “yes.” More on that below.)

Haben Girma, the first deaf/blind student to graduate from Harvard Law School, had me reflecting on these questions during her visit last month to UNC. Haben, who was invited by Advocates for Carolina, a student group formed to reflect on life for the disabled on the UNC campus, spoke about her disability and her story to WUNC and to more than 100 students gathered in the Student Union. She now spends her days as a Skadden Fellow at Disability Rights Advocates in San Francisco, where she works to increase the accessibility of digital instructional materials at colleges and universities.

Like others who have struggled to make a life for themselves amidst an able-bodied culture, Haben refused to allow society to shut her out. She has spent her young life problem-solving around a profound inability to engage in the marketplace of ideas as seamlessly as the rest of us do. While certainly no law has directly infringed Haben’s right to free speech, it is very clear that her speech experience has been profoundly different than the experiences of most U.S. citizens.

That raises the question of government responsibility: What is the state’s role, if any, in assuring access to the marketplace of ideas for those whose access is impaired by a physical and/or mental limitation? And how can digital and online media technologies contribute to that access?

It’s a question I’m interested in thinking more about after Haben’s visit and in the wake of a settlement last year between Netflix and the National Association of the Deaf. The Netflix case revolved around the movie service’s “Watch Instantly” on-demand service, which failed to provide closed captioning on all content. The case ended with a consent decree that mandated Netflix provide captions on all streamed programming by 2014.

Federal District Court Judge Michael Ponsor rejected Netflix’s argument that the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) did not require Internet Service Providers and other digital media providers to make accommodations:

“In a society in which business is increasingly conducted online, excluding businesses that sell services through the Internet from the ADA would run afoul of the purposes of the ADA and would severely frustrate Congress’s intent that individuals with disabilities fully enjoy the goods, services, privileges and advantages, available indiscriminately to other members of the general public.”

In other words, the Internet’s marketplace of ideas must and should be accessible to the disabled. This expanded view of the ADA bears watching for its First Amendment implications going forward. In the meantime, I’ll be sending the link to this post to Haben, hoping that she will post a response below.

 

 

 

1

Lessig v. Corruption (2013)

By on March 1, 2013 in Journalism, Transparency

lessigcartoon

Larry Lessig will visit UNC on Monday, and we will confess to feeling a bit geeked out at the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy.

What is it about Lessig that continues to captivate political activists, hacktivists and academic observers some 15 years after he was first elevated into the limelight as a special master in the Microsoft antitrust case?

I can’t claim any special understanding of Lessig’s magnetism beyond what many others have said and written in the past. He is obviously not without his critics and detractors. But there are a few insights I can share about what makes him an unusual legal scholar and uniquely qualified, I believe, to root out corruption in government.

He’s someone who reaches and engages his audience.  Lessig’s first blog was followed closely by legal scholars, the tech community and others interested in copyright reform. There, he regularly engaged with those who posted comments and critiques, many of which were as interesting and thoughtful as Lessig’s own posts. In several of those posts, he began to envision a plan to change Congress, eventually the start of his Change Congress/Fix Congress/Rootstrikers movement. His move into the study of institutional corruption was prompted by years of uphill battle against the special interests entrenched in copyright legislation – and in the pockets of congressional representatives seeking re-election. Copyright wasn’t going to change without real change in how Washington worked.

I added my two cents and theorized about how such a movement might gain mass media attention. To my surprise, we engaged in a back-and-forth email discussion, and I was off to Washington, D.C., to help out with his initial announcement to launch Change Congress.  I was one of many who found themselves in this position.

But I’m just another academic.

On another occasion, I went to Cleveland to see Larry speak to a group of reform-minded Clevelanders about his efforts to change Beltway culture. The audience was interesting and varied and included a gentleman hiding in the back of the room who struck me as a Tea Party supporter. (I lived close to Tea Party activists in the Midwest for several years, so I had a good sense of who they were and what they wanted at a grassroots level.) Out of all the wonks, activists and academics in the room, it was this one young man that Larry seemed most compelled to talk to and to answer his questions and persuade. Lessig is, as he says, “cross-partisan” not “bi-partisan.”

He’s someone who has publicly changed his mind, but who is more authentic for having done so. Americans love a good story, but I think they especially like a credible story. Lessig’s is a story of right to left. Raised a Reagan Republican, he experienced a sea change in thought studying abroad. Increasingly, he has taken on the rhetoric of the activist, referring to Dr. Martin Luther King and pledging justice in the wake of Aaron Swartz’s death. This is not a Lessig we would recognize before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003. It’s an unapologetically public journey of change, and he has taken many of us – willingly — along with him.

He understands and embraces the passion of youth.  In Remix, Lessig warned of a war against youth culture and a stifling of innovation under an increasingly repressive copyright regime. He understood that new generations would see code as their printing press, with new possibilities and social upheavals on the horizon as a result:

“Now I worry about the effect this war is having upon our kids. What is this war doing to them? Whom is it making them? How is it changing how they think about normal, right-thinking behavior? What does it mean to a society when a whole generation is raised as criminals?”

His words were tragically prescient. Aaron Swartz’s death has been a watershed moment in the copyright wars – a moment that is mobilizing the Internet in new ways.

He listens more than he talks. His unique presentations are legendary, and hundreds will flock to hear them. He can talk for more than a solid hour and hold the attention of everyone in a room. But if you watch Lessig away from the podium, he’s listening and asking questions more than he is talking — and particularly listening to folks at the grassroots. Away from the microphone, he is an observer and often the quietest person in the room.

He gets tech. And tech gets (and admires) him. There are few (if any) legal experts who understand technology as well as Lessig. He is as at home in Internet protocol as he is in intellectual property law. He speaks in code and is comfortable in geekdom. He likes learning from them. That has endeared him to that community.

Finally, he’s a constitutionalist. Perhaps others have said this of him. I realized today that this year is the tenth anniversary of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the U.S. Supreme Court case challenging the Copyright Term Extension Act, the case Lessig argued in front of the Court on behalf of Eldred.  Constitutionalism recognizes that the document isn’t just a series of rules – it’s a series of rules that limit government on behalf of the people. Eldred was all about limiting the government’s reach. Lessig’s new fight is about limiting the effects of special interests on that governance.

With so much more at stake, we can only hope his new battle is more successful.

0

Hell Freezes at Disney on Ice?

By on December 9, 2012 in Copyright

minnie

Many of us are all too familiar with Disney’s role as the engine behind the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 and as an ironic beneficiary of the public domain and its importance to society.

Suffice to say Disney’s role in helping to broaden copyright protections in the last two decades is well-known…and often a sore spot for those of us concerned about the over-expansion of copyright.

All that, however, is lost on my 9-year-old daughter and her 4-year-old cousin, who spend as much time as possible recreating every Disney Princess story there is – and inventing a whole host of derivative works, mostly on the floors of their playrooms.

When “Disney on Ice” announced it was coming to town, there was little question that we would go. And so I prepared myself to be assaulted by the Disney machine and its confines. (And I questioned my own loyalty to the free culture movement and the public domain.)

So you can imagine my surprise when the announcer told us that photography of the performance was permitted, “for personal use only please.”

Disney embracing fair use?! And politely, too!

(Fair use photography by Jennifer Smeltzer Smith).

1

Hazelwood’s Sheep

By on November 9, 2012 in First Amendment

University of Arizona’s David Cuillier told us yesterday that “we’re raising a generation of sheep” in the wake of Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, the U.S. Supreme Court case that curtailed the First Amendment rights of students. The Media Law & Policy Center has been holding an eye-opening two-day conference on the 25th anniversary of the decision and the state of student speech more generally.

David’s comments hit me hard as a teacher of college students but especially as the mother of a 9-year-old.

Though the U.S. Supreme Court told us in Tinker v. Des Moines that students’ free speech rights don’t stop at the schoolhouse gate, we may want to think about having parents and educators check their helicopter propellers there. I work hard to check mine every morning, but as I look around, I see many of us, including teachers, swooping in at the first sign of struggle with our children and with our students. Our effect on student speech environments is significant, and it is fundamentally changing how we think about free speech and how we think about regulating it.

Our tendency toward the “helicopter response” is showing up in our classrooms, and it makes talking about controversial topics just that much tougher every year I teach.

On Wednesday I decided to reserve time in my journalism media law class for discussion of the presidential election. At first, students were hesitant to talk, as usual, for fear of judgment and disagreement. I did my usual teeth-pulling. Finally, I was told that they were sick of the social media cacophony they were witnessing by those who had “won” and those who were “ready to pray every day to save America.”  Like the four-year-old whose plea for the election to be over went viral, my students were ready to stop talking about the election.

But the truth is they never really started. The truth is that many of them have stayed inside the sheep pen. And we let that happen.

Critical pedagogy theorists like Mina Shaughnessy, Paulo Friere and Henry Giroux have been urging us for years to allow our students to struggle, fail and debate, and then guide their journey toward greater learning. They have been urging us to stop the robotic testing, skilling and drilling, and demands for perfection in academic performance. They urged us to urge them to talk about the difficult stuff – not the stuff I usually wind up talking to them about: test scores and cover letters.

The First Amendment has always recognized the struggle inherent in granting protections for free speech. But in raising our students to be good performers and genuinely nice people, we have taught them that failure and conflict are bad and are to be avoided. We have taught them to be quiet about controversy and about their own failures. And we have hidden our failures as educators along the way.

Not all students are like this, obviously, but in ten years of teaching, I will say that many are. And many more are potentially headed in that direction.

What will it take to change that approach? I’ll take that up in my next post, but welcome your thoughts here.

0