Pell, Eve. The Big Chill: How the Reagan Administration, Corporate
America, and Religious Conservatives Are Subverting Free Speech and the
Public's Right to Know. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. 269 pages.
Eve Pell is a West Coast journalist who writes for progressive
publications. In this book she chronicles the anti-free speech climate of
the early Reagan years, and how this has affected a broad spectrum of
Americans. Her book has four main sections: 1) the federal government as
censor (the Executive Order on Classification, Antileak Directive NSDD 84,
the weakened FOIA, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the courts,
and encroachments on science and high tech); 2) censorship in schools,
libraries, and business (book banning and pornography censorship on the
right and left); 3) libel (the use of libel law by the powerful to harass
the weak); and 4) suppression of dissent (Senate Subcommittee on Security
and Terrorism, unleashing the IRS and other agencies, and conservative
public interest legal foundations).
Pell performs a service by warning us that tolerance in America is on
the decline, and accurate when she sees this as a problem on both the left
and right, from the national government all the way to the local level.
Eight years later the problem is more serious because of an ailing economy
that decreases the choices we have, the increasing monopoly of the major
media, and the deterioration of the educational system.
ISBN 0-8070-6161-1
Extract the names from this source
Back to search page