Huffington Posts A 1st Amendment Plea

Storm the telecom blockades! Tear down the news ​“paywalls”! Broadband for all, cheap!

New media baroness Arianna Huffington brought that clarion call to Yale Law School Monday.

Nothing less is at stake, she said, than the First Amendment.

“Access to the internet needs to be free and unfettered,” she declared, so that the press can challenge authority and get information out to the public.

And by press, Huffington didn’t mean just the Bob Woodwards and Bob Scheiffers of the old mainstream press. She meant ​“citizen journalists” and Iranian cellphone-wielders, too.

Huffington made her pitch in an hour-and-a-half speech and question-and-answer session in the law school’s auditorium. It was the latest event in the school’s ​“Liberty Tree First Amendment Online Colloquium,” organized by the Yale Information Society Project and the Knight Law and Media Program.

Huffington founded and edits the Huffington Post, the most widely-read new-media online news website in the country. It sells ads and pours out its information — original news reporting from professional reporters, opinionated blogging from all sorts of people, ​“aggregated” links to other media outlets’ stories — for free.

That’s how the online news media should work, she said Monday: Free information available to the whole world from a world of sources, edited (or ​“curated”) by skilled pros, supported by advertising. That’s why we’re in a ​“golden age” of online news, she said.

She portrayed that golden age as threatened by forces that aim to re-bottle the genie and stifle ​“the freedom to innovate without permission, which has been the hallmark of the internet since its inception.”

The top threat, according to Huffington’s Monday speech: efforts by telecom companies to control what information goes out over the Internet, at what speed, with a toll placed on the pipes. She embraced the movement toward ​“net neturality,” to empower government regulators to keep access to the web open equally to all comers. (Click here for a summary of both sides of the issue.)

Huffington noted that the First Amendment begins with the words ​“Congress shall make no law.” That meant the way to protect a free press and freedom of speech was to prevent government from taking action that would hinder unpopular voices or challengers to power. (Full text here.)

But nowadays Congress needs to act, in order to prevent private internet service providers from limiting speech, Huffington argued.

Similarly, she noted that 60 percent of the country lacks access to broadband internet access. For freedom of speech and freedom of the press to thrive, the government should take action to connect the entire country to broadband, at low cost, she argued. ​“This is a shovel ready program as far as I’m concerned.”

And she criticized newspaper and other old-media companies for drawing up plans to put much of their copy behind a ​“pay wall” that requires readers to pony up to read it, or to install ​“meters” that charge per article.

She argued that the strategy won’t work, because a new generation has grown accustomed to free information on the web; and that it shouldn’t work, because society benefits from the free flow of information.

She predicted that advertising will support quality online reporting, along with help from foundations and other charitable donors interested in backing investigative journalism through projects like ProPublica and Huffington Post’s own initiatives. (Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch her discuss this.)

Rather than innovate, old-media companies which failed to adapt to the internet age are seeking to erect ​“roadblocks” to protect their position, stifling innovation and other voices, Huffington maintained.

She criticized the notion — popularized by old media apologists (and proposals like this one, to have government subsidize corporate-style big media) — that it’s dangerous to rely on the new online media rather than old print or broadcast outlets.

Huffington’s Exhibit A: Last June’s anti-government protests in Iran accompanying a presidential election.

Huffington noted that New York Times Editor Bill Keller was in Iran covering the elections. He wrote a report from the newspaper saying that the government had effectively shut down and ​“neutralized” the protest movement.

Meanwhile, out of earshot or eyesight of traditional media reporters, protesters surged onto the streets. They beamed the news through cellphones and Twitter — and the whole world was watching.

China’s government understood the lesson, Huffington said: When it had protests, it shut down websites and online social networks. But it invited in ​“prominent journalists” from Western media outlets for an official tour.

“They knew you could fool a few journalists, but you can’t fool tens of thousands of citizen journalists,” Huffington said.

Exhibits B and C: The Iraq war and the financial meltdown. Mainstream journalists like Bob Woodward had access to the government and private-sector decision-makers in the lead-up to both catastrophes. And they missed the entire story.

Huffington wasn’t downplaying the important work that mainstream, professional journalists. Her point was that the new media landscape combines their work with the mass reporting ability of the crowd. She also said that trained editors continue to play a crucial role in weeding through all that information to ensure accuracy and balance.

But the elite mainstream media can’t tell the whole story.

“Access is often a major trap for journalists,” Huffington observed. ​“In order to maintain access, they often” give up the ability ​“to tell the truth.”