New institute aspires to protect First Amendment in digital era

[WestVirginiaRebel]

McClatchy:

WASHINGTON

Almost a half-century after the Supreme Court gave two newspapers the right to publish the Pentagon Papers in a victory for press freedom, the struggle over First Amendment rights is shifting now to cell phones and global web sites.

 

A new research and litigation center plans to step into that rapidly changing environment with journalism, law and technology scholars and experts and a mission to define and protect free speech in the 21st Century.

 

The $60-million venture announced this week by the Knight Foundation in Miami and Columbia University in New York is ambitious. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia will tackle issues from the balance between privacy and national security to the very meaning of news when professional training or expensive equipment aren’t needed to deliver the messages that shape history.

 

“Right now, with the Internet and the Web, we have one of the largest transformations in communications technology ever,” Columbia University President Lee Bollinger told McClatchy. “Every time you have a new communications technology – whether it’s the printing press, radio or TV – major questions come up under freedom of speech, because the context changes.

 

“We hope to help define the First Amendment over the course of the next decades.”

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Saving free speech for the Web.