For those seeking a better acquaintance with public, or civic, journalism — an imprecisely defined genre that seeks innovative ways to embrace citizens' perspectives on issues and stimulate public debate — this anthology provides illumination. My advice is to start at the end, with the summary article by Philip Meyer of the University of North Carolina, which offers ways to think about public journalism historically and philosophically and assesses its effects, or lack of effects, on today's journalism. In the immediately preceding article, Edmund B. Lambeth discusses in equal depth the possibilities of cultural change within journalism — that is, whether public journalism might alter the way that journalists define their role in society. The earlier part of the book has a good deal of gritty graduate-student research on public-journalism experiments and statements from advocates and opponents. But Meyer and Lambeth cut to the heart of the matter.

CYBER RIGHTS: DEFENDING FREE SPEECH IN THE DIGITAL AGE, by Mike Godwin. Times Books. 333 pp. $27.50

For several years in the mid-1990s, the constitutional future of the Internet hung in the balance: Would it be treated as a medium of expression meriting the full protection of the First Amendment, or would it be subject to content-restrictive regulation, like broadcasting under the Federal Communications Commission?

This is a lively, garrulous account by an activist who was deeply involved in turning back the threat of regulation and, at least for the time being, securing rights of free expression online. Mike Godwin is a former journalist and now counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization devoted to guarding individual rights in cyberspace. The first half or so of his book is an informal primer of the status of First Amendment law on the Internet relating to such topics as libel, privacy, and copyright. In each of them he thinks that the open, democratic nature of online discourse will solve most problems. The rest of the book is a more intense personal chronicle of Godwin's deep involvement in what he calls the "cyberporn panic" — the push to control Internet content that involved dubious research generated at Carnegie Mellon University, a cover story in Time, and eventual congressional passage of the Communications Decency Amendment to the comprehensive communications legislation of 1996.

Although the Internet is often scorned by mainstream journalists as the source of rumor and falsity, Godwin points to something of the reverse, an Internet community united to correct a mainstream falsification. Ultimately, Godwin shows, this strong response laid the groundwork for lawsuits that enabled the Supreme Court to declare the "decency" amendment unconstitutional. He was in the thick of things throughout this effort, and his journal lets the reader relive the tension and uncertainty of trying to halt a media stampede before it crushed everything in its path.

HARRY S. TRUMAN AND THE NEWS MEDIA: CONTENTIOUS RELATIONS, BELATED RESPECT, by Franklin D. Mitchell. University of Missouri Press. 277 pp. $34.95

Over the years, the University of Missouri Press has offered many monographs on the state's only president, often titled Truman and [subject goes here]. This latecomer is a rather literal account of his administration's encounters with wire services, newspapers, radio, and the beginnings of television, padded with chapters on men and women of the press, including for some reason Korean war correspondents. Somehow, the work fails to reflect fully the intensity and bitterness of the press assault on Truman, fully as bitter as that of the Clinton era — the strident campaigns to depict the administration as corrupt, as ineffectual in dealing with communism, and as, paradoxically, wrongheaded in fighting communists in Korea. Moreover, the promise in the subtitle is not fulfilled; the book devotes only seven pages to Truman's decade as an ex-president and says almost nothing on the "belated respect" that history has bestowed on him.

FORGIVE US OUR PRESS PASSES: SELECTED WORKS BY DANIEL SCHORR, edited by Matthew Passmore and Chip Robertson. University of California. 163 pp. $14.95

It is always a pleasure to encounter Daniel Schorr (and we are fortunate enough to be able to hear him almost every day, still, on National Public Radio). If this collection, mostly of his speeches, does not always show his work to best advantage, his genial but acerbic appraisal of the broadcast journalism to which he has devoted so many decades nonetheless shines through. This happens to be a twentieth-anniversary issue of a publication of the Hastings College of Law, and the editors have tricked out Schorr with largely unnecessary footnotes; they have also obtained introductions by William Schneider and Geoffrey Cowan, and a prolegomenon by William Safire (which means about the same thing). Chronologically, the items range from a 1974 article for cjr about the Nixon administration's clumsy effort to cover up an FBI check on him, to the title article, dated 1998, in which he reflects on being eighty-one. The most interesting revelation is in a presentation to the Hillel Jewish Student Center at Michigan State in 1997; he remarks that he might well have worked for The New York Times rather than CBS had he not been barred by the Times's temporary freeze in 1953 on the hiring of Jews as foreign correspondents, purportedly because the paper was short of non-Jewish correspondents to cover Arab countries in case of a war in the Middle East. He tells this tale, as always, without malice.

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