Jerome A. Barron · June 2008
76 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 826 (2008)
Like old soldiers, old law review articles usually just fade away. This one didn’t. In a remarkable speech at this symposium, Justice Breyer engaged with the issues raised in the Access to the Press paper as if it had been written yesterday. But it wasn’t written yesterday. It was written forty years ago. In light of all this, I thought it might be useful for me to reflect on the major themes of Access to the Press and see what it has to say to the media world of today.
There were three themes I was interested in developing in that paper that I am going to talk about today. First, I wanted to develop the theme that the marketplace of ideas as portrayed in the media, the courts, and the academy was a phantom. It was romance, not reality. The second theme was that private power as well as government power could inhibit or obstruct full and free discussion fully as much as government actors. Technology and patterns of media concentration had combined to place a few companies with the power to control access to the content to which the majority of the population was exposed. The third theme I wanted to advance was that a right of access was one way to remedy this imbalance in the opinion process. I am going to discuss each of these themes to determine whether they are still problems and to what extent the issues they present have changed. I am going to conclude by discussing whether an access remedy is still necessary in the age of the Internet.
