According to scholar of the first amendment C. Edwin Baker, the marketplace ideas metaphor is the dominant rationale given for freedom of speech. Although not as old as the bill of rights itself, its been used for over a 100 years, since Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr used it Abrams V. United States in 1919.
He said that ‘the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
There are many critiques that could be made of the marketplace metaphor, and what’s presented here will be necessarily limited, but taking a look at the concept philosophically while exploring some pivotal moments in the history of the press should serve to highlight where the metaphor fails, and what a more accurate metaphor might look like.
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Credits:
Stock footage provided by Videvo, downloaded from
The Gentleman's Magazine: Photograph by MichaelMaggs; original author "SYLVANUS URBAN, Gent". [Public domain]
Sources:
Martin Conboy, Journalism: A Critical History
John Nerone, The Media and Public Life: A History
Ralph Negrine, Politics and Mass Media in Britain
Jared Schroeder (2018): Toward a discursive marketplace of ideas: Reimaging the marketplace metaphor in the era of social media, fake news, and artificial intelligence, First Amendment Studies, DOI: 10.1080/21689725.2018.1460215
Robert L. Kerr, IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR IN THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS: THE PRINCIPLES OF ADAM SMITH AS AN ETHICAL BASIS FOR REGULATION OF CORPORATE SPEECH
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