Jeffery A. Smith – författare

At the end of his seventy-year career as a journalist, Benjamin Franklin trained his grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, in his profession. After his grandfather's death, Bache brought the republican and Enlightenment ideas he had been taught to the heated party controversies of the 1790s. He became the leading Jeffersonian journalist of the period and was boycotted, physically assaulted, and eventually charged with seditious libel shortly before his death in 1798. Jeffery Smith vividly illustrates the intense ideological conflict of the period through this original study of Bache's education and career.

Drawing on sources ranging from political philosophers to court records and newspaper essayists, Printers and Press Freedom traces the development of a widespread conception of the press as necessarily exempt from all government restrictions, but still liable for the defamation of individuals. In this study, Smith carefully analyses libertarian press theory and practice in the context of republican ideology and Enlightenment thought.

War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power is a groundbreaking and provocative study of one of the most perplexing civil liberties issues in American history: What authority does or should the government have to control press coverage and commentary in wartime? First Amendment scholar Jeffery A. Smith shows convincingly that no such extraordinary power exists under the Constitution, and that officials have had to rely on claiming the existenceof an autocratic "higher law" of survival. Smith carefully surveys the development of statutory restrictions and military regulations for the news media from the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791through the Gulf War of 1991. He concludes that the armed forces can justify refusal to divulge a narrow range of defense secrets, but that imposing other restrictions is unwise, unnecessary, and unconstitutional. In any event, as electronic communication becomes almost impossible to constrain, soldiers and journalists must learn how to respect each other's obligations in a democratic system.

Over the course of the two centuries between the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791 and the Gulf War in 1991, the American press lacked an adequate right to analyse and report on this nation's armed conflicts. When restrictions were challenged as violations of the Constitution, military regulations and federal laws were justified as necessary under the "higher law" of survival. Is there some law more important than the Constitution which allows prerogative powers to be used in a time of war or national crisis? This groundbreaking and provocative study, examining law and history over these two hundred years, argues that press freedom cannot and should not be suspended during armed conflict. Author Smith maintains that the military and the media must work together on such matters, for neither has authority over the other.