Conference: Democracy, Law, and Independent Journalism
Multiple speakers
Notes & Changes
Please note that this will be a hybrid event. Further details will follow soon.
About the event
Press-freedom organizations are warning of increased governmental efforts to undercut independent journalism within democracies. The pattern appears well underway in some countries and looms as a threat in others with leaders who seek to follow the same model. The playbook is notable for ostensibly preserving basic press- and speech-protective doctrines. Meanwhile, it weaponizes legal weaknesses that allow leaders with populist and authoritarian tendencies to harass disfavored journalists, silence adverse coverage, and prop up media that support the ruling party. It includes pressuring media organizations with bureaucratic regulations like tax, immigration, and antitrust rules; exploiting civil litigation to financially drain and preemptively silence news outlets; and vilifying journalists in an effort to curb any public pushback against these tactics while reinforcing a generally hostile environment for the independent press. These political shifts—alongside other economic, cultural, and technological ones—are abruptly upending our longstanding sense of how the news media operates in democracies. They raise hard questions about the relationships between democracy, newsgathering, and law. This conference explores these questions. What does it mean to value and support a free press as these risks loom? Are threats to independent media fueling broader democratic backsliding? How can law protect the functions of the press, and how can it be weaponized to stifle those functions? And what can be learned from the past that might help fortify independent journalism at this troubling moment?
Programme
9:30 - 10 am | Coffee and tea
10 am | Opening remarks
Kate O'Regan, Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights
10:15-11:45 am | Panel 1: Weaponization of Civil Suits Against the Press: As a candidate and in the early months of his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has garnered attention for a flurry of civil lawsuits against press organizations. Some are rooted in defamation law; others take new, creative forms, like allegations that editorial decisions by media outlets amount to election interference or consumer fraud. Critics charge that the suits—all of which have been costly to defend and many of which have settled for large sums—are part of a wider administrative effort to target the press. In the European Union, the UK, and elsewhere, legislative attention is also turning to efforts to identify and prevent various Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. Political libel suits, even when not conceptualized as press-freedom issues, spark debates about their impact on independent journalism. Are the tides changing for press protection in these contexts? Are lawsuits being used to chill or punish reporting? If so, what solutions are viable?
Panelists: Peter Coe (University of Birmingham), Lyrissa Lidsky (University of Florida), David Rolph (University of Sydney).
11:45am – 12:45 pm | Lunch
Boxed Lunches will be served in the Atrium.
12:45 pm - 2:15 pm | Panel 2: The Populist Playbook and Attacks on Press Freedom: In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, news organizations predicted that the country and its press might find themselves the targets of a populist playbook that has also been used in Hungary, India, Brazil, and elsewhere. They cautioned that the second Trump administration intended to sow distrust of the press, normalize harassment of journalists, weaponize regulatory authority to punish dissenting newsgatherers, exploit the courts, and encourage loyalists in the private sector to mirror and amplify these tactics. Are those fears well-founded? What are the signs that previously stable democracies are actively undercutting press freedom, and in what ways do independent media remain strong despite these pressures? Is the current moment any more perilous than other moments of government-press relations? How do law and constitutionalism buffer against various threats in liberal democracies, and how are they falling short?
Panelists: Quinn McKew (ARTICLE 19), RonNell Andersen Jones (University of Utah), Jacob Rowbottom (Oxford University), David McGraw (The New York Times) [via Zoom]
2:15 – 2:30 pm | Break
2:30 – 4 pm | Panel 3: The Future of Press Freedom: A confluence of economic, cultural, technological, and political shifts has abruptly upended our longstanding sense of how the news media operates. Suddenly, it seems, these sweeping changes have realigned the traditional relationships between and among democracy, newsgathering, and press freedom, prompting new questions about what it means to value and support a free press. Many traditional forms of journalism are disappearing, but democracies continue to need the press functions even as the media landscape in which they are performed evolves. As both figurative and literal attacks on these roles intensify, and as reliable access to shared facts dwindles, how can we craft legal doctrine that will identify and protect these roles in enduring ways? Which functions of the press are essential to a healthy democracy and why do these functions matter? Who is fulfilling these functions, and what legal and policy protections are necessary to safeguard them?
Panelists: Sonja West (University of Georgia), Gavin Phillipson (Bristol University), Martha Minow (Harvard University) [via Zoom],
4 pm | Conference attendees are invited to join in a reception
About the organisers
RonNell Andersen Jones is a University Distinguished Professor and Teitelbaum Chair in Law at the University of Utah and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. A former newspaper reporter and editor, Professor Andersen Jones is a First Amendment scholar who teaches, researches, and writes on legal issues affecting the press and on the intersection between the media and the courts. She is one of the foremost scholars on American press freedom, with work that addresses the role of journalism as a check on government and the constitutional and statutory rights of newsgatherers. She is a widely cited national expert on media defamation suits. Professor Andersen Jones’s scholarship has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Northwestern Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Washington University Law Review, and the Harvard Law Review Forum, and she is co-editor of “The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times,” forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is a frequent commentator on media-law matters for MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal. For the 2023-24 academic year, Professor Andersen Jones was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. During Trinity Term 2025, she will be a research visitor at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University.
Jacob Rowbottom is a Fellow of University College, Oxford, and Professor of Law in the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. He holds a BA in Jurisprudence from Oxford and an LLM from New York University School of Law. He was previously a University Lecturer in Law and Fellow of King's College at the University of Cambridge. He is a qualified barrister and previously worked on the staff of an election campaign for the US Senate. His research interests include media law, freedom of expression and the legal regulation of the democratic process. He is the author of Democracy Distorted (2010) and Media Law.