ABSTRACT
Free speech is, after all, a privilege. The United States has the strongest free speech protection in the world. Free speech, as a concept, was handed down to the people colonizing America based largely on English common law, which, while not totally inclusive, was still recognized as a hard-won privilege. Freedom of expression in the West has had a long and tumultuous history. Today, the marketplace of ideas theory is still strongly adhered to by most people working in the media. The implications of this hypothesis are clear for most media practitioners, especially those whose job it is to produce messages that will compete successfully with other messages—and that's just about everybody in the media. The principle of legal paternalism asserts that we have the obligation to protect others from harm. The principle of legal moralism holds that something may be prohibited because it is simply immoral.
