“We have hammered for two centuries on the primary theme that the press must be free, that any and every citizen has the right to express his opinion of his government,” noted James S. Pope, the recipient of the inaugural Elijah Lovejoy Award for journalistic achievement. “But of what value are these opinions if they are based on ignorance or part truths?” (164). Pope's observation in 1951 captured the critical dilemma affecting freedom of speech in the United States, which Sam Lebovic brilliantly dissects in Free Speech and Unfree News. The paradox at the heart of the tale is how Americans have enjoyed freedom of expression, enshrined through a free press, without rights to the free flow of information. Consequently, Lebovic argues, free speech has been protected while the sources on which that opinion is based have shrunk. As a young Walter Lippmann noted in his classic 1920 text Liberty and the News, “traditional liberties of speech and opinion rest on no solid foundation” (7).

By emphasizing the seemingly simple but critical distinction between “freedom of the news” and “freedom of the press,” Free Speech and Unfree News provides a superb, wide-ranging history of twentieth-century US politics, culture, law, and secrecy. The battle over the concept of press freedom has been largely rooted in classic, liberal readings of the First Amendment, with much of the jurisprudence geared to preventing formal government censorship and regulation of the press. Yet without serious attempts to address the public right to access information, Lebovic explains how efforts to enshrine press freedom unfolded alongside the emergence of media conglomerates, the economic collapse of the newspaper industry, the rapid growth of government secrecy, and inadequate freedom-of-information regulations. The problem is best illustrated in relation to the modern state secrecy regime – an improvised, patchwork system established through post-World War II and early Cold War statutes and executive orders – that formally enabled press freedom by allowing journalists to publish what they want while making access to state information increasingly difficult. Government agencies classify secret information at source, with access protocols overseen by the very same agency. Overclassification is endemic and the cornerstone of state secrecy. How, then, has the press reported, especially on matters related to national security, in the modern era? One source is the anonymous political leak emanating from the state, the other is via public-interest whistleblowing. Lebovic muddies the terms and concepts here but the wider point remains valid: relying on unauthorized disclosures is a precarious platform on which to base the public right to information on government activities.

The paradox of press freedom and marginalization of the public right to news was ensconced by the 1970s. Although the concluding chapter of Free Speech and Unfree News brings the discussion up to the present, the sustained analysis ends here, with Lebovic able to only gesture to how his otherwise convincing thesis played out during the final decades of the twentieth century. The impact of the Internet and the digital revolution has essentially kept things the same today, he claims, through more freedom of expression in the public sphere alongside greater government information control (227). Given the advancement in technology, both in enabling free speech and in state secrecy, the point is worthy of further elaboration. Nonetheless, meaningful public participation in democratic debates remains uncertain. Toward the end Lebovic assesses the merits of various policy proposals and initiatives to improve the flow of information in the American polity, which is a little out of kilter with the rest of the book. A “diverse news ecology” with established newspapers, independent journalism, public and private funding, alongside reform of state secrecy appears prudent (244–48), but would it rectify the paradox? The takeaway from Lebovic's meticulous history suggests that changes are unlikely to address the fundamental problems. As with any work covering a large span of time and addressing multiple themes, a few issues are left underdeveloped. The richness of material is particularly evident in chapter 7, where several crucial stories come together – changes in modern secrecy, journalistic culture, First Amendment rights, and Cold War culture – and could be the subject of separate monographs. Lebovic does a fine job of covering the terrain, although there is a lot to fit in.

It is perhaps churlish to ask for more from an already tightly packed book that speaks to several critical themes and subfields. Such quibbles are testament to Lebovic's accomplishment in producing an outstanding book that is highly original, extensively researched, and well written. It is a worthy recipient of the Organization of American Historians’ 2017 Ellis W. Hawley Prize. Like all standout works, it not only analyses the past through a fresh perspective but also helps explain how we arrived at the present. The concepts of press freedom and state secrecy were not bestowed but debated and constructed piece by piece, haphazardly in the case of the latter. In an era where the notion of “fake news” is rampant and the echo chamber of news consumption is rife, Free Speech and Unfree News is compulsory reading.