Of Note

Rep. Rick Boucher, Gary Shapiro
Honored at Institute Awards Banquet

Rep. Rick Boucher (above) received the Freedom of Speech Award, and Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, received the American Horizon Award at the Institute’s Friends & Benefactors Awards Banquet in Washington on Oct. 15. ABC News President David Westin was the keynote speaker.

 

Institute, Thomas Jefferson Center File Brief

The Media Institute joined The Thomas Jefferson Center in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court urging First Amendment protections for TV content.

Speaking Freely

The Terminator Cometh
by Robert Corn-Revere

In James Cameron’s 1984 film “The Terminator,” a killer cyborg from the future portrayed by now-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is described by another character...

Policing Hate Speech: Not the Government’s Job
by Tony Mauro

On the campaign trail last September, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus of the need to “stop the hateful rhetoric filling our airwaves”...

Media & Communications Policy Blog

News and Opinion
by Patrick Maines

It’s not often that a parenthetical aside is the most notable part of a speech or written document, but that’s exactly the case with an opinion piece published in today’s Washington Post by that paper’s columnist Robert Samuelson.  Writing, and brilliantly as always, about health care legislation, Samuelson takes The New York Times and The Washington Post to task not just for....  

Commissioner Michael Copps
and Media Ownership
by Patrick Maines

Owing to his always-earnest and mild-mannered (if intellectually scruffy) ways, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has rarely inspired anger.  No matter how wrong-headed his views – and he’s been wrong about virtually everything for the whole of his time as a Commissioner – he’s been accorded that kind of tolerance that people bestow on those seen to be sincere and to mean well.