Hi and welcome to Mass Communication Law for the winter session!
The course will officially open on December 19, but I will open it to you at noon on
December 17, 2015. That will give you a few days to poke around the course, read
through the syllabus, and see how the course is going to work. It will be very useful if
you can obtain a copy of the required text before the course begins, and I have included
information about it in this letter.
About the course:
The study of mass communication law—or any law, for that matter—may be new to
most of you. For those of you who intend to work in communication professions, this
course will give you the grounding in the law surrounding those professions that you will
need to operate successfully on a day- to-day basis. It will also give you a grounding in
the evolving meaning of one of the core freedoms guaranteed by the United States
Constitution: freedom of expression. If you are looking for “the answers” about what you
can and can’t do, this course may be frustrating for you, because despite what you may
think, the law is not usually an unchanging thing, and just because something is the law
doesn’t mean that the law is right. We will look closely at the current state of the law in
the U.S., but we will also spend time thinking about why the law stands the way it does,
and in what directions the meanings of the law and particular legal decisions are going.
Text and readings:
There is one required textbook which you will need to purchase for this course:
Mass Media Law 19th Edition, by Don R. Pember and Clay Calvert
ISBN: 978-0077861421
I know that this is not an inexpensive book, but there are several less expensive ways to
access it, including digital textbooks, used copies and renting. It has been ordered at
the Marist College bookstore, too.
I will also note that this is the 19th edition of this text. The publisher releases a new
edition every year or two, since the law changes quite quickly. However, since the basic
principles change slowly, you would be fine if you were to purchase, say, the 18th
edition if you are able to find a less expensive copy.
However you access the book, I strongly encourage you to get it quickly. We will be
using it from the very beginning, and this is a course that really requires that you do the
reading every week. Keep up with it, too. You can easily fall behind.
I have also posted several other readings for this course, including original legal
decisions by Federal judges (including the U.S. Supreme Court) and one comic book
about copyright law. You can find these in the Resources section of iLearn, organized
into folders corresponding to each course module.
About me:
I'm an Assistant Professor of Communication/Journalism here at Marist. I have been
teaching full time here since 2009, and I have been on the tenure track since the fall of
2014.
I teach American press history, media law, narrative journalism, news editing, and
reporting and writing integrating contemporary technology and social media tools. Last
spring, I earned my doctorate in journalism and media studies from Rutgers University,
where I completed a dissertation entitled “Gadfly to the Watchdogs: How The
Journalism Review (MORE) Goaded the Mainstream Press Toward Self-Awareness in
the Seventies,” chronicling an influential journalism review and its role in countering
anti- intellectualism in the American press. Before I taught at Marist, I taught journalism
at Seton Hall University and LaGuardia Community College of the City University of
New York.
I have published journalism in Slate, The New York Times, New York magazine and
other publications. I also worked at Architectural Record, where he served as the
magazine’s first web editor and as the editor of the print magazine’s department for
young architects.
For my research and writing, I specialize in American journalism history, press criticism,
journalistic professionalism, including law and ethics, and journalism in higher
education. I hold a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of
Journalism and a bachelor's in nonfiction writing from the University of Pennsylvania. I
was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in St. Paul, MN and Arlington, TX.
Contact and office hours:
There are several ways to get in touch with me during (and before) the course. The one
I'm mostly likely to see and respond to first is my email address:
kevin.lerner@marist.edu
I look forward to seeing you online!
KML