Fox News host Mark Levin shows how those entrusted with news reporting today are destroying freedom of the press from within: "not government oppression or suppression," he writes, but self-censorship, group-think, bias by omission, and passing off opinion, propaganda, pseudo-events, and outright lies as news. Levin takes the reader on a journey through the early American patriot press, which proudly promoted the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, followed by the early decades of the Republic during which newspapers around the young country were open and transparent about their fierce allegiance to one political party or the other. It was only at the start of the Progressive Era and the twentieth century that the idea of "objectivity of the press" first surfaced, leaving us where we are today: with a partisan party-press overwhelmingly aligned with a political ideology but hypocritically engaged in a massive untruth as to its real nature

Documents all sides of the Rushdie controversy, providing an international chronology of events, early reviews of the book, and more reflective articles drawn from the huge, worldwide coverage, fairly and fully representing all points of view.

What did "freedom of the press" really mean to the framers of the First Amendment and their contemporaries? This masterful book by a Pulitzer Prize–winning constitutional historian answers that question. In Emergence of a Free Press (a greatly revised and enlarged edition of his landmark Legacy of Suppression), Leonard W. Levy argues that the First Amendment was not designed to be the bulwark of a free press that many thought, nor had the amendment's framers intended to overturn the common law of seditious libel that was the principal means of stifling political dissent. Yet he notes how robust and rambunctious the early press was, and he takes that paradox into account in tracing the succession of cases and reforms that figured in the genesis of a free press. Mr. Levy's brilliant account offers a new generation of readers a penetrating look into the origins of one of America's most cherished freedoms.