UNC will celebrate its fourth-annual First Amendment Day on Tuesday, Oct. 2. The celebration is organized by the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy with generous funding from Time Warner Cable. Activities range from a reading of banned books, including Chancellor Holden Thorp reading from The Catcher in the Rye, to a First Amendment trivia contest at Linda’s Bar & Grill. The full schedule of events is here: http://firstamendmentday.unc.edu.
Come out and join in the fun!
Today’s New York Times has a very flattering (but well deserved) profile of Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s “chief lawyer.” It notes Twitter’s efforts to protect Free Speech and remarks that the company thinks this will give it an edge over its rivals. That’s one of the reasons I use Twitter — and stay away from Facebook, as much as I can — but this competitive advantage argument only works if companies are transparent about what they are doing (re: subpoenas, etc.) and people actually care enough to make that a factor in choosing an online service. I’m not quite so sanguine that either is the case today.
In any event, the profile is worth a read.
A recent Ph.D. graduate of the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication has won the 2012 Nafziger-White-Salwen Dissertation Award for the best dissertation in the field of mass communication.
The winner is Dr. Dean Smith, an affiliated scholar of the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy. The dissertation award is given by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and will be presented during the association’s national convention in August.
The title of Smith’s dissertation is “Legislating the First Amendment: Statutory Shield Laws as Non-Judicial Precedents.” The work will be published as a book next year by LBF Scholarly Publishing.
Smith’s dissertation adviser was Dr. Cathy Packer, co-director of the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy.
In the fall, Smith will join the faculty at N.C. State University as a teaching visiting professor of journalism in the English Department. He also will teach as an adjunct professor at High Point University.
UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication Ph.D. student Liz Woolery will participate in The Cleveland City Club’s 2011 Conference on Free Speech Oct. 11, 2011. The one-day conference brings together scholars, media practitioners and lawyers to discuss free speech issues facing the fields of politics and journalism. In advance of the event, Liz is blogging about free speech news and issues on the Club’s blog.
Wat Hopkins, Park Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, presented his research at the Mary Junck Research Colloquium. Dr. Hopkins discussed the Supreme Court’s recent treatment of non-traditional language and the appropriate level of protection for the emotive, as well as the cognitive, element of speech. The presentation focused on the justices’ attempt in FCC v. Fox Television Stations to define the f-word and then determine whether, when used as a fleeting expletive rather than repeatedly, the word is indecent for broadcast purposes. Dr. Hopkins, a professor of communication at Virginia Tech, has published three books and a number of articles on free speech topics. The presentation was co-sponsored by the UNC Center for Media Law & Policy.
