Speaking Freely

Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Professor Emerita and Senior Fellow at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), was national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008.

An internationally acclaimed free speech scholar and advocate, who regularly addresses diverse audiences and provides media commentary around the world,  Strossen is also the Host and Project Consultant for “Free To Speak,” a 3-hour documentary film series distributed on public television in 2023.  Her books about free speech include:  “Free Speech:  What Everyone Needs to Know®” (Oxford University Press 2023); “HATE:  Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship” (Oxford University Press 2018); and “Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights” (Scribner 1995), which was republished with a new Preface in 2024 as part of the NYU Classics Series.

Her many honors and awards include the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Judy Blume Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech.   She serves on the Advisory Boards of several organizations that do free speech work, including:  ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), Heterodox Academy, National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin.

Stephen Buckley has been The Dallas Morning News’ public editor since April 2024. A veteran editor and educator who worked at The Washington Post, Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute, Stephen is a faculty member at Duke University’s Dewitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy, where he has taught journalism and public policy since 2021.

After graduating from Duke in 1989, Stephen spent 12 years at The Post as a local reporter and foreign correspondent. He covered education, courts and the night police beat before joining the international reporting staff, initially as the Post’s Africa Bureau Chief (based in Nairobi) and then as the paper’s first correspondent based in Brazil. He returned to St. Petersburg in 2001 as a national reporter for the Times before taking on several leadership roles, ultimately becoming managing editor and then publisher of tampabay.com, the paper’s website. He moved to the Poynter Institute in 2010 as dean of the faculty.

In 2014, he moved back to Nairobi, where he taught at The Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications before becoming the lead story editor for Global Press Journal, an international news organization that focuses its reporting on under covered regions.

Ashley Muddiman (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is an associate professor and associate chair in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, and a faculty research associate with the Center for Democratic Governance (University of Kansas) and the Center for Media Engagement (University of Texas). Her work focuses broadly on democracy and political communication, specifically investigating political incivility and democratic norms, political media content and its effects on the public, and mis- and disinformation in democratic contexts.

She has earned fellowships with the Social Science Research Council, studying whether political incivility on women candidates’ social media spaces may serve as a barrier to entry into politics, and The New Institute (Germany), investigating how solutions-focused news coverage can decrease polarization in online discussion. Her current projects include a national survey collecting public perceptions of political incivility; an investigation of political hostility in local KS, MO, and OK news coverage during the 2024 election season; and an exploration of how strategic uncertainty used by political leaders may undermine trust in accurate information and public institutions.