Constructing Freedom of Speech in Elite News Media: 2011 - 2020

Freedom of speech is one of our most important and most contested rights. While the First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech, it does not define it, leaving the matter of determining the boundaries between what we will and will not sanction largely to the courts.

There is also a substantial body of legal scholarship concerning various aspects of freedom of speech. Those ideas, though, are largely relegated to the academic sphere. Media is an important conduit through which the ideas debated and advanced in that academic sphere reach the general public, but its role in doing so has gone largely unexamined.

This dissertation examines how elite media outlets contributed to socially constructing free speech rights. Using thematic analysis, this study examined how those outlets described freedom of speech over the decade from 2011 through 2020. It found that those media outlets served primarily as communicators of classical values about freedom of speech and reinforced an expansive view of speech rights. Primary among those were the necessity of speech to self-government and its function in checking abuses of official power, the need to protect dissent and coarse speech, and recognized some non-verbal behaviors as speech. The media discourse also appealed to personal propriety or civility rather than law as the preferred limiters of speech. Those values also reflect the enduring influence of the marketplace of ideas conception of speech and a preference for the ancient Greek value of parrhesia, or the ability to express one’s own views with frankness.