| First Amendment scholars and advocates have often criticized the American public's inconsistent dedication to free expression. Many studies have attempted to identify variables that predict procensorship attitudes, but these relationships remain enigmatic. The confusion is due, in part, to the myriad ways in which "censorship attitudes" has been conceptually and operationally defined. Informed by First Amendment theory and case law, a new tool for measuring these attitudes is proposed and tested.; The "Willingness to Censor" scale measures public censorship attitudes across categories of expression and types of media. The categories are: commercial speech (advertising), defamatory speech, political speech, pornography, hate speech, speech that raises privacy issues, and abortion speech. The media are: the Internet, newspapers, magazines, television, cable, "pure" speech, and demonstrations. Respondents express their willingness to censor within 49 scenarios, each incorporating a unique combination of speech category and medium. With this scale, it is possible to generate a measure of overall willingness to censor, as well as subscores for each category and each medium.; The results show that many predictors---including demographic variables, other social category variables, media usage, predispositional variables, and relevant sociopolitical attitudes---have different relationships with various dimensions of public willingness to censor. These analyses help to explain how previous research could have found seemingly contradictory results about the relationship between willingness to censor and other variables, because the size and direction of the associations depend upon the particular category or medium of expression at issue. |
