FREE SPEECH / CENSORSHIP
"Legislation should outlaw an advertiser's attempts to use its economic relationships with a media enterprise to influence the enterprise not to print or broadcast content that it would otherwise choose to present . . . . There is little reason to allow this use of economic power to censor others' speech and to block the public's access to information or viewpoints."
C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press, 1994, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 100.
"Advertisers, not governments, are the primary censors of media content in the United States today."
C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press, 1994, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 99.
"It is not easy to describe the present position of legal opinion on advertising and free speech. Only a poet can capture the essence of chaos."
R. H. Coase, "Advertising and Free Speech," 6 Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1977), p. 32.
"Advertising, the dissemination of messages about the goods and services which people consume, is clearly part of the market for ideas. Intellectuals have not, in general, welcomed this other occupant of their domain. And the feeling of antipathy has been shared by economists, who, until comparatively recently, have tended to deplore rather than to analyze the effects of advertising."
R. H. Coase, "Advertising and Free Speech," 6 Journal of Legal Studies 1 (1977), p. 8.
"Historically, it was thought that the sole or primary enemy of free expression was the State. Today, the consequences of commercial communication reveal that the private captains of the advertising empire may prove to be an enemy of equal stature."
Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, "Commerce & Communication," 71 Texas Law Review 697 (1993), p. 726-27.
"Liberals don't much like commercial speech because it's commercial; conservatives mistrust it because it's speech."
Alex Kozinski and Stuart Banner, "Who's Afraid of Commercial Speech?" 76 Virginia Law Review 627 (1990), p. 652.
"Commercial speech is like obscenity ... we can't seem to define it, but we know it when we see it."
Jef Richards (1996), Associate Professor of Advertising, The University of Texas at Austin.
"Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak, commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health."
Rodney A. Smolla, "Information, Imagery, and the First Amendment: A Case for Expansive Protection of Commercial Speech," 71 Texas Law Review 777 (1993), p. 797.
"The question about those aromatic advertisements that perfume companies are having stitched into magazines these days is this: under the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, is smelling up the place a constitutionally protected form of expression?"
Calvin Trillin (1986), quoted in Stephen Donadio, The New York Public Library: Book of Twentieth-Century American Quotations, 1992, New York: Stonesong Press, p. 71.