By Lee C. Bollinger

At Columbia's commencement last spring, I asked the 12,000
graduates to consider one of the most daunting questions their
generation will face in the increasingly interconnected world they
will inherit: How will they—and we—realize on a global scale the
principles of freedom of speech and press that have defined their
experiences at an American university, where the prerogative to
speak out on any topic and to pursue ideas has been the norm? That
is not an easy question for any of us to answer. Rapid globalization,
driven by the combined forces of expanding free-market economies
and new communications technologies (principally, of course, the
Internet), means that creating a system of free expression of news
and knowledge is no longer only a moral issue of spreading human
rights. It is also a very practical challenge of getting access to the
ideas and information we need to function as a society dealing with
a myriad of border-crossing challenges, including financial
recession and climate change, terrorism and infectious disease.

On the one hand, the Internet offers unparalleled opportunities for
enhanced communication and sharing of knowledge. But it has not
rendered censorship obsolete, and it presents determined
governments with dangerous new tools for surveillance and
repression of civic life both online and off. Consider some of these
contradictory developments of recent months:

We have seen a secretive North Korean government sentence two
American journalists to 12 years of hard labor in prison for what it
said were hostile acts of reporting the news, before they were
released to former President Clinton.

We have witnessed the inspiring demand for democracy by Iranian
citizens met not only with violence but also with a fierce government
crackdown on both domestic and international news media, as well
as on access to the Internet. Indeed, a number of governments in
different hemispheres have used a variety of means to control or
penalize news outlets that are critical of political leaders.
With Google's highly public confrontation with China over
government efforts to censor search results and intrude on
individual user privacy, we have just the latest example of the twosided
nature of the revolution in information technology.

Yet, on the other hand, we have also seen compelling examples of
how new technologies provide new ways to escape the censor's
shroud: the millions of Chinese Internet users who have learned
how to "scale the great fire wall" and use the World Wide Web
unrestricted; the extraordinary tweets and cellphone videos
uploaded by Iranians after accredited journalists were deported or
barred from covering last year's post-election demonstrations; the
brave journalists in Latin America who blog about their
governments and societies. Like the underground samizdat—the
mimeographed manuscripts quietly shared among dissidents and
intellectuals during the Soviet era—the Web has allowed free speech
to avoid the reach of the most authoritarian regimes.

With respect to the news media, in this age of global publication, the
problems we face are threefold: overcoming censorship, protecting
access for the media and the newsgathering process, and building
the capacity of the media to provide us with the professional
journalism we need to build a healthy global society. The United
States has developed two remarkable sets of institutions, the press
and universities, each of which in its own way generates the
knowledge needed for meaningful self-government and creative
problem solving. One primarily provides information focused on the
immediate, that is, "news." The other concentrates on deeper
understanding and analysis of our world through rigorous
scholarship.

But the challenges of globalization and economic change threaten to
leave both of those essential institutions behind, in some cases
without the resources and, in others, without the intellectual
capacity to help us truly understand the world we face and its
potential.

We generally take for granted the cacophony of voices in our own
society, especially now that anyone can, and often does, have a
personal online soapbox. But we should not forget that America is
radical among nations in our free-speech tradition. In the stirring
language of the U.S. Supreme Court's famous decision in 1964, The
New York Times v. Sullivan, we have over the past century put our
faith in a system that is "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open."
We should also remember that it was not always so. Laws protecting
state secrets, forbidding speech deemed "dangerous" and
"offensive," and favoring reputation over free expression went
largely unchallenged for much of our history. It wasn't until 1919
that the court even took a case on the meaning of free speech—
upholding the Espionage Act of 1917 and allowing the Socialist
presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs to be jailed simply for the
"act" of voicing his support for resisting the draft during World War
I. Here at Columbia, President Nicholas Murray Butler comfortably
informed the university that vocal opposition to the war would be
grounds for dismissal.

It took several decades for our judiciary to give us the remarkably
unrestricted freedom we have today. Our elected government acted
in many ways to do the same: For example, by creating a system of
broadcast regulation in 1934 that did not permit censorship but did
include requirements to serve the public interest, and by later
creating and financing a public broadcasting system and, in the case
of state legislatures, enacting shield laws for reporters.
Over the course of the 20th century, the country was remaking itself
as we moved from a collection of individual states with local
jurisdiction over local problems to a national society able and
compelled to face up to increasingly national issues. As a society, we
became more inclusive and pluralistic, making dialogue an even
greater necessity, and our means of communication expanded. We
had the good sense to know that we had to create and fortify a
national public forum, protected against the chilling effects of local
laws or censorship. Collectively, we bet our future on a simple
proposition, that people behave better when they know more.
By the 1970s, a long line of U.S. Supreme Court rulings had firmly
established in constitutional law the values of a freer and more open
society. During this period, our major newspapers and broadcasters
were able to deliver an ever-increasing volume of fairly high-quality
news and information, in large part because they reaped monopoly
and oligopoly profits as either the only daily newspaper in a locale
or one of a small number of local stations or networks. Quality news
and public affairs were therefore affordable (or, in the case of
broadcasters, made a condition of federal regulation). So for several
decades, we enjoyed both a legal regime that protected a free press,
and an economic situation that made journalism a reliably
profitable business.

A decade into the 21st century, we see repeated examples of how
much of the world does not take the same view of freedom of speech
and press that we now do. And as we have all seen in recent years,
the very same technology—the Internet—that is making global
communication so pervasive is simultaneously undermining the
financial model of the traditional news media as we have known it.
Unfortunately, at the very moment when we want and need more
serious reporting on global issues, we are getting less of it as the
news media pull back, closing foreign bureaus and decreasing
coverage of international news.

What, then, can be done to encourage a truly global forum of free
speech and a free press abroad, while also sustaining quality
international reporting here in America? And what special role
should American universities play in that effort? Let me offer a few
suggestions.

First, we must start with a new perspective. Nothing ever really
begins to change until people begin to think differently, and in this
case, we need to move beyond seeing free speech and a free press as
exclusively a matter of human rights. Second, we must realize that
we have a collective need for the free flow of information and ideas
essential for dynamic economic markets to function efficiently, for
governments to tackle societal challenges effectively, and for
scholars to achieve research advances. As the declining economic
fortunes of the news business have forced American newspapers
and network news divisions to shutter their bureaus abroad, we
must increasingly depend on foreign news organizations for a
significant part of our international coverage. One result is that
censorship in one country can effectively lead to inhibiting speech
everywhere. For example, although the British are now in the
process of re-examining their libel laws, which strike a very different
balance than ours do between free speech and individual reputation,
we have seen how "libel tourism"—when plaintiffs choose opportune
jurisdictions in which to file suit—can effectively chill speech
anywhere. That is because the Internet has meant that to publish
anywhere is effectively to publish everywhere, and thus to be
exposed to the law everywhere. Executives of Google have been
indicted in several jurisdictions around the world because of the
offensive or allegedly defamatory content appearing on sites to
which they link. German laws criminalizing Nazi speech are
threatening the way people report events on Wikipedia.
Putting aside issues of censorship, the fact is that we already depend
on the foreign news media for much of our international news,
especially on television and radio, through rebroadcasts of the BBC
and BBC World Service on PBS and NPR. Such news comes courtesy
of the British citizens who pay a TV license fee to support the BBC.
Meanwhile other government-supported broadcasters, like China's
CCTV, are developing their own global presence reflecting their own
values and perspectives. The United States' official international
broadcasters, like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, were
developed during the cold war, primarily as tools of our
anticommunist foreign policy, and they remain barred from airing
within American markets, reflecting our distinctive tradition of
wariness toward government propaganda.

At the same time, America has never made the kind of serious
investment in public broadcasting that most other nations have—
and that was originally promised by the creation of the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting in 1967. In a new world of borderless
communications, we need to consider reforming the Voice of
America and Radio Free Europe to develop a true publicly financed
global, independent, and high-quality journalism enterprise infused
with our First Amendment traditions. That means we need to
overcome our instinctive resistance to public support of the press.
The fact is that our news media have never operated in a purely free
market. They have benefited at various times from economic
monopolies, technological monopolies over the airwaves and cables,
and favorable postage rates. We have also long had a hybrid system
of publicly regulated commercial broadcasting and publicly financed
nonprofit broadcasting.

To take another dimension of the problem, the message we must
convey to other countries is that we cannot have an economic
relationship unless we also have the openness to information and
ideas that ultimately is the foundation for that relationship. We
need to become more committed to the development of
international legal institutions governing free speech and a free
press. Starting at home, the Supreme Court could build on the
essential values of Times v. Sullivan by extending its interpretation
of the First Amendment to a global public forum—for example by
finding a right of news gathering in war zones. To be sure, there will
always be active debate about how much one nation's legal system
should cite precedents from elsewhere. But we should recognize that
our court's voice is respected in much of the world and can be highly
influential.

Ultimately we want to develop and expand global legal norms and
create legal structures for resolving the differences about freedom of
the press, and we have a base to start from with Article 19 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As early as 1948, decades
before the Internet, the drafters of the declaration recognized that
some sort of international framework would be essential for
protecting the right of free expression in an increasingly
interconnected world. Similarly, the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights, adopted by the United Nations General
Assembly in 1966, provides, "Everyone shall have the right to
freedom of expression; this freedom shall include freedom to seek,
receive, and impart information of all kinds, regardless of frontiers."
Within the context of international human-rights law, that language
is unique in its implication that citizens of one nation may have a
right against other nations.

To be sure, the real meaning of any legal norm cannot be
understood without considering the mechanisms for enforcement.
There, the record of human-rights reporting is disappointing and
the barriers to enforcement significant. The free-speech and freepress
provisions of regional treaties and conventions, like those of
the Organization of American States, have achieved the greatest
level of legal effectiveness. But clearly we must also look to other
international structures with greater leverage. It is especially
appropriate for us to make press freedom a critical element of
international-trade and investment law and policy. Last month,
after Google's very public confrontation with China, Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave what was actually a longplanned
address on global Internet freedom, explicitly making the
link between our economic relationship with China and censorship
there. "Countries or individuals that engage in cyberattacks should
face consequences and international condemnation," she said. "By
reinforcing that message, we can create norms of behavior among
states and encourage respect for the global networked commons."
The World Trade Organization provides one possible avenue, as do
regional and bilateral agreements such as the North American Free
Trade Agreement and the United States-Peru Trade Promotion
Agreement. Of course some member countries have long resisted
having "social clauses" linked to trade. But cases involving media
and communications have nonetheless already come before the
WTO: A recent decision found that China had violated its
obligations by restricting distribution of certain communications
through state-controlled agencies. There are many other specific
examples of how we can begin to place free speech and free press in
their unique role within a globalized economy.

Universities must consider a range of programming and
partnerships to produce quality journalism. That is already
happening as more universities and their journalism schools join
local news media to create new online outlets. We can play a major
role in training journalists from abroad. Indeed, one of the things I
have found over the past few years working on a book about a global
free press is that independent, fearless reporting exists even in
societies where censorship continues and free-press traditions have
yet to take firm root. As so many of us in higher education strive to
become more global in our perspective, we need to integrate, more
than we do now, in every field of study, and in every center of policy
making, a sense of how vital it is that there be the freedom of
thought, speech, and press that we have come to enjoy throughout
our society.

We must also take the long view, because it will take time to achieve
these goals, just as it took us nearly a century to bring our own First
Amendment rights and the system of a free and independent press
to their full meaning. While we face serious challenges, on balance,
such engagement enhances the free exchange of ideas and free speech
values. Ultimately, the best defense we have against global
censorship is probably going to be getting more quality information
to more people, because the more people know, the more they are
likely to want to know.

For those of us committed to a system of higher education with the
dual mission of discovering new knowledge and training a new
generation of global citizens, there is no more important task than
creating a global society in which ideas matter, knowledge can be
pursued freely, dissent can be heard, and objective news can be
gathered and published. Americans can neither take those rights for
granted nor be satisfied to enjoy them while they are denied to
others.

Lee C. Bollinger is president of Columbia University and author of
Uninhibited, Robust and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New
Century (Oxford University Press).