In the Internet world, all info is everybody’s info. That has made media freedom a global issue as never before — think of Google in China. But it has also threatened that freedom, as old business models fall apart for newspapers and TV networks, threatening the big newsgathering institutions the world needs.

In this future-happening-now, what’s going to happen to the First Amendment? And freedom of the press?

Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century

Lee Bollinger

(Oxford University Press; US: Jan 2010)

Amazon

Lee Bollinger, law professor, First Amendment scholar, president of Columbia University, and author of “Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century” (Oxford University Press, $21.95), thinks through these pressing questions a lot.

Bollinger’s book title comes from the Supreme Court’s 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision, a major shaper of our present media freedoms. Sullivan supported “the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

“It’s an incredibly exciting, incredibly daunting moment,” Bollinger says by phone from his Columbia office. “The Internet, as a way to speed information around the world, has given us an extraordinary opportunity with enormous potential.” What’s daunting, he says, are the jobs of planning for a fully integrated world and designing media to serve it.

So how do you prop up the media? Once they’re propped, how do you make sure they can do their work freely, as the First Amendment promises?

Those questions lead to the boldest proposals in Bollinger’s book.

True, media are businesses. But they’re special businesses: moneymaking enterprises committed to public service. To a singular degree, the public welfare, and the welfare of a free democracy, depends on their unhindered operation. But they can’t operate if they can’t make money. No money, no info. No info, less freedom, less future.

“We can’t rely on a free market to do everything,” Bollinger says. “I grant right away that the press should largely be in the free market, but what you’re most likely to see is a mixed or hybrid system, in which part of your support comes from sales and part of it from public or foundational support.”

In “Uninhibited,” Bollinger toys with several ideas. A national fee to support media institutions? Nonprofits? Business support (as long as businesses can’t affect content)? All should be in play.

Then there is the First Amendment itself — or the way we interpret it. “I’m not suggesting we change the Amendment,” Bollinger says. “I’m saying the courts should recognize the right of the press to gather information from the government.” In his book, he calls it the Doctrine of Access to Newsworthy Events and Information.

So far, the Supreme Court has come close but never affirmed a right to gather news. As it is today, with new technologies for encoding info and keeping it secret, Bollinger argues journalists are all but forced to use leaks and other “less savory” methods to budge loose closely held government info. He wants that uneasy media-government relationship put to rights.

“If you believe in the rights of the press, and if you believe that government will always overdo claims to secrecy,” Bollinger says, “you need to defend and strengthen the right of the media to access information.” He grants it will be a complex task — “but no more complex than it was to work out the idea of freedoms in this country in the first place.” He also has no illusions that the present Supreme Court would ever favor such a task.

A second bold call in his book: Make the national press a global press. An integrated world calls for worldwide acceptance that media have the right to search for information, and citizens the right to learn it.

Many would not be thrilled with this idea. China, for example. Bollinger suggests we tie media freedom to trade issues. His message to other countries: “We can’t have the relationship we need to have without the free flow of information.” He sees a role for the World Trade Organization in tying media freedoms to aid packages.

Like the right to access information, this global media freedom will be a hard, long thing to create. “Establishing freedom as we now have it,” he says, “took us a long time, and it’s still not perfect. Mere naming and shaming won’t do it, internationally.”

His final thoughts bring us back home, to what we need here and now. “I don’t care if the New York Times exists in 10 years exactly as is — but we need something like a New York Times,” he says. “We’ll need the big institutions. It’s a myth to think we can just sit back and let hundreds of thousands of bloggers take the place of major media institutions, a myth to think that the Internet by itself, left alone, will eliminate censorship.”

Daunted but excited, Bollinger is looking forward. “Fifteen years ago, businesses and institutions were just starting to work their way through the new media world, and that’s still going on,” he says. “We can get started on the future work right now.”