The study of press freedom lends itself to a variety of fruitful approaches. The most common approach focuses on governmental constraints and weighs them against legal or philosophical principles that are seen to have broad or even universal application. A second approach, which also is likely to focus on ways that the press is constrained by government, treats issues of press freedom comparatively, looking at the way that such issues have arisen and have been resolved in different societies or in the same society at different periods of time. A third approach, which our essay will follow, might best be described as contextual. Governmental interference is viewed as but one of several interacting forces that may be present in a given social context to hamper editors or journalists in their daily activity.
A contextual approach assumes that press freedom is limited not only by what newspapers are forbidden to do, but also by what they find difficult or impossible to do. This approach is especially suited to the examination of how the press functions during wars or other crises, for in such times, impediments to the gathering and reporting of news arise from all sides. Drawing from consecutive issues of major Georgia newspapers in the period 1861-65, we view press freedom from the standpoint of Georgia's editors and reporters who, during the Civil War, faced a broad range of difficult and closely interrelated problems, of which official interference or censorship was seldom the most pressing.
Our analysis covers three main areas:
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Last updated: March 9, 1998.
Comments to: Communication Department
