ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 12 No. 8 (August 2002) pp. 487-488

THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND THE MEDIA IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION by David A. Yalof and Kenneth Dautrich. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Cloth 155 pp. $55.00. ISBN: 0-521-80466-3. Paper $19.00. ISBN: 0-521-01181-7.

Reviewed by John B. Gates, Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis.

Normative and empirical scholars of the First Amendment and the press will find much of interest in this work. THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND THE MEDIA
IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION is an exploration of individual diffuse and specific support for media freedoms in the United States. Political scientists David Yalof and Kenneth Dautrich conducted two national surveys of households in 1997 and 1999. These surveys sought to tap individual support for press freedom in abstract and concrete terms. Given the media-specific focus of the empirical work and the grounding in democratic theory, this book provides important and timely data on a subject vital to the public opinion and the First Amendment.

Firmly rooted within the theoretical debate over the AMERICAN VOTER, the work argues that the public's commitment to the press and its freedom is generally consistent with optimistic portraits of the American citizen. This positive assessment may appear somewhat surprising to some given the initial substantive chapter. The national surveys uncover how few Americans are aware of the media's constitutional footing. The authors find, for example, that only about ten percent of the respondents are aware that the First Amendment specifically extends protection to the media. Even fewer of the national respondents could identify press freedom as having a constitutional basis.

The respondents do not appear impressively aware of the press or cognizant of its status among such constitutional freedoms as free expression. The authors argue that the low-levels of abstract or diffuse support may reside in the public's immersion into the Clinton-Lewinsky story during the implementation of the survey instrument. They appropriately describe their optimism on the public's abstract commitment to media freedom as "guarded."

The bulk of the work explores public opinion and the media along two important dimensions. First, the authors examine the public's dedication to diffuse and specific support for contrasting forums such as magazines, broadcast television, cable, radio and the Internet. Does the public provide varying levels of support for the media depending upon the type of outlet? Including the Internet in their definition of the media adds greatly to the utility of their data. They find that the public bestows less tolerance for the electronic mediums than for the print forums.

Second, the surveys allow the authors to assess the public's consistency in applying a content-neutral standard across the various types of media. Using sexually

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explicit material as a test of the limits of public support, the authors find that the public makes important distinctions across media in terms of the amount of preferred freedom. "Americans are not so 'fed-up' or 'angry' with press freedoms as conventional wisdom would have us believe…. Rather, the public lends its support to press freedom across the board, qualified only by societal concerns of invasiveness and easy accessibility" (p. 110).

There is also a limited individual-level analysis of the respondents and their support for media freedom. Many will find this demographic analysis remarkably stark. Beyond basic box scores across such categories as ideology, party or age, the reader will wonder why a multivariate analysis would not have proven much, much more insightful. Without such analysis, the authors can only speculate on the possible interactions between age, gender, and ideology.

The careful use of the book-length treatments of public opinion, civil liberties, and democratic theory is one of the several strengths of the work. This makes the work a useful introduction to undergraduates. A more productive addition would have been to craft the theoretical frameworks and their important empirical insights within the more carefully refined empirical findings of journal research. The debates over the "pluralism" of intolerance are simply not discussed or cited. This is not a minor omission because many of the conclusions could have been more carefully nuanced by attention to these more discrete, yet significant, works.
Hence, the work will be of limited use for graduate students interested in public opinion and the media in the United States.

Yalof and Dautrich provide extremely interesting and important data on the media and public opinion in THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND THE MEDIA IN THE
COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION. Their guarded interpretation of the findings on the public's specific support for press freedoms will bring solace to some. Others may emphasize the low level of abstract knowledge of the press and the First Amendment. There are few simple portraits of the American Voter especially in today's very complicated, ever-changing, and highly regulated media environment. Knowing the First Amendment includes the press, however, would be more encouraging for advocates of free expression.

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Copyright 2002 by the author, John B. Gates.