The election of Donald Trump has thrust issues of media law and press freedom into the limelight in ways not seen since the Watergate era. As a candidate and as President-Elect, Trump has rankled journalists and First Amendment scholars with his controversial positions on executive branch transparency, journalists’ access to government officials, the scope of defamation law, and the protection of satire and parody. Both his propensity for communicating directly through social media and the wave of hyper-partisan “news” stories distributed by social media in the run-up to his election raise important questions about the continued vitality of traditional “fourth estate” models. They also raise questions about the ways in which law that is based on potentially outdated assumptions about the media and politics might map onto the new media and political realities. In this session, a panel of media-law experts, communications scholars, and political reporters will discuss the President-Elect’s views on the media and explore what the Trump Administration could mean for freedom of the press in America.
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