Radio Haïti-Inter, Haiti’s most prominent independent radio station and the first station to regularly broadcast news, reportage, and interviews in Haitian Creole, is best known for its investigative journalism, political analysis, and pro-democracy activism under its famous director, Jean Léopold Dominique. But Radio Haiti was also a place where artists of all kinds, especially literary writers, presented, discussed, and declaimed their work to a wide public over the airwaves. In fact, there is no clear line between Radio Haiti’s political content and its literary content. Many of Radio Haiti’s journalists, including Dominique himself and his daughter, novelist Jan J. Dominique, were also literary writers. A literary sensibility suffused much of their content; discussing art or literature allowed them to talk about the country’s social and political situation in a hostile realm; and much of the literary work contains implicit or explicit political meaning. Creating a platform that allowed a wider audience to experience literary works through programs like Radio Haiti’s “Entre Nous” was a political, revolutionary act.

This chapter takes some of Defoe’s satirical poems and pamphlets, including The True-Born Englishman (1701), The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), and A Hymn to the Pillory (1703), as starting points for a brief study in how Defoe’s writing and experiences reflected disputes over what today we would call matters of censorship or suppression of thought. Included here is an examination of the slippery concept of ’seditious libel’ in the period, Defoe’s sense of what ’freedom of speech’ and ’freedom of the press’ entailed or should entail, and how Defoe’s involvement in party politics and political controversy shaped his thoughts on the roles of the state and the courts in regulating political and religious expression.

Chapter 5, in parallel to the preceding one, focuses on the other, elected chamber of the Estates Assembly (or Parliament) and discusses Hegel’s characteristic notion of a representation of interests, along with the broader societal conditions for successful representation. The chapter first reconstructs and contextualises the electoral mechanism as envisioned by Hegel and elucidates the political significance of corporation membership, which connects Hegel’s civil society and state. In this context, special attention is paid to the exclusion of women, while Hegel’s purported negligence of farmers is refuted. The chapter then sets out the conditions Hegel considered necessary for the successful representation of societal interests, which include freedom of the press and trials by jury, notwithstanding his ambivalent attitude towards public opinion. The final section shows that these very preconditions were under siege at the time Hegel was writing, following the politically motivated murder of Kotzebue and the institution of the so-called Karlsbad decrees. The direct bearing of these circumstances on the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right rounds off this contextual study.

The calls for freedom of press in the mid-seventeenth century, like the earlier calls for freedom of speech, also came mostly from devoutly religious people: Puritans and Nonconformists and their religious-based demands. That religious basis was mostly a desire to disseminate religious preaching and knowledge, and an imperative to do that not only by preaching and other speech but by publishing religious books and pamphlets, in addition to a religious basis in freedom of conscience. John Milton, the trailblazer in seeking "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience," tried to extend parrhesia from speech to publications, and built his case in Areopagitica and in other pamphlets on freedom of conscience, on Bible passages, and on similar religious messages. Though Areopagitica is generally described in scholarly literature as unnoticed and overlooked until the end of the seventeenth century, it in fact was relatively widely known, as nearly fifty quotations or allusions show before that century’s end. Besides Milton, other Puritans were the dominant advocates for freedom of press before the end of the seventeenth century, including three who wrote a generation before Milton (an anonymous minister, Leonard Busher, and William Ames), and Levellers and others.

This chapter explores the historical roots and purposes of the Free Speech and Freedom of the Press Clauses of the First Amendment. It shows that the most of the early conflicts in this area concerned press freedoms. Disagreements over these issues came to a head over the Sedition Act of 1798, which was used by the Federalist Party to jail its Republican opponents. Ultimately, out of this conflict the Republicans articulated a new model of citizenship, rooted in principles of popular sovereignty, which remains central to our system of government today. Freedom of speech, on the other hand, played a very limited role in early history. Regardless of its humble origins, however, the Framing generation agreed that Free Speech, like Freedom of the Press, was an essential element of democratic government. Unfortunately, these rights have often been ignored by our government and the judiciary during times of stress such as the Red Scare and the McCarthy era. Today, however, thanks to the influence of pioneering arguments by Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Louis Brandeis, there is broad agreement that these rights are essential to democracy and so must be protected.

Chapter 2 examines the conjectural circumstances that prompted commercialism, popular culture, and women’s magazines in Iran. Addressing the Iranian media structure, the discussion focuses on three major dimensions in the local media system: the development of the popular print media market, with particular emphasis on circulation; moves toward journalistic professionalism; and the nature of state intervention.