Fighting for Free Expression

The Newspaper Guild-CWA, and its conference co-sponsors, the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO’s Department for Professional Employees, have targeted four specific threats to free expression and professional rights that they have vowed to fight:

• Proposed FCC policy changes that further relax media ownership rules. Changes include lifting the 27-year-old cross-ownership rule, which bars companies from owning both a newspaper and TV station in the same market. The Economic Policy Institute says reversing the rule and “giving any owner an exclusive monopoly over a locality’s top news sources might generate more company profits but has a negative economic, social, cultural and political impact.”
  
  
• Higher education’s growing use of non-tenured part-time faculty. Studies show 43 percent of faculty members today are part-time with little or no job security and none of the academic freedom that is granted to tenured, full-time professors.
  
  
• Corporate limits on scholarly research. Contracts, grants and money for scientific studies has led many universities to put business interests ahead of student interests and objective research.
  
  
• Commercial pressures that compromise K-12 teaching and open inquiry. Schoolhouse commercialism has quadrupled in the past decade, experts say. Corporations are sponsoring lesson plans, writing exclusive agreements for merchandise sales and installing free electronic equipment that delivers advertising to its captive student audience.