Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schoenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. It's hard to imagine principles more foundational to American self-conception as a free people than the guarantees of free speech and a free press embedded in the First Amendment. Given their importance, it's strange to realize that these principles almost didn't become
Part of the Constitution. Rights, after all, already existed in state constitutions and centuries of English common law, so many framers didn't think it necessary to write them down. Given how frequently those rights have been challenged since, it's a good thing they did. So, what happened to change their minds? The guest today is Pulitzer Prize winning historian and Stanford Professor Emeritus Jack Rakove.
The episode is a distilled version of a longer interview covering the origins of the First Amendment, but for this episode, we'll leap right into its adoption into the Constitution. And then we'll take another great leap into whether that Constitution, for all its eighteenth century brilliance, is up to governing the country we have become today. Rakove has doubts.
It's a question Eric will explore further this fall when he teaches an online course on the First Amendment open to everyone at the University of Chicago's Gram School. You'll find the sign-up link below in the show notes. But now, first, here's Jack Rakove.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to the origins of the First Amendment 01:13 The absence of free speech in the original Constitution 02:24 State declarations of rights and their meanings 06:30 The political process behind adding the Bill of Rights 09:13 Madison's concerns and the drafting of amendments 17:00 Contemporary challenges to free expression and the First Amendment 20:39 The state of American constitutional norms today
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
New Thinking. Innehållet i podden är skapat av New Thinking och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
