June 26, 2007

"Freedom of the Press" Doesn't Mean the Media

Gene Policinski, vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center, writes in an essay published by the American Press Institute about the impact of bloggers and other grassroots media on the definition of the "free press" discussed in the First Amendment.

For most of the nation's history, much of the public's attention - and much of the legal contention - regarding a free press has been on the "free" part. But of late, figuring out the "press" portion has gotten a bit tougher, often as the result of the work of Internet entrepreneurs.

There's no specific definition of "press" in the 45 words of the First Amendment. So who might be bound by responsibilities that go along with the role of a free press? Are bloggers and other Web users part of a broadly defined "press" even though they certainly could not have been envisioned by the Colonial-era Founders who wrote the First Amendment?

What the First Amendment means when it says "the press" is best understood by reading the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment does not reserve a "freedom of the press" to only those who designate themselves as "professional journalists." The First Amendment was not written to protect "journalists" - it was written to protect the right of the American people to speak, to publish, to gather and to worship.

Today, we hear the phrase "the press" and think it refers to the "news media," i.e., those professional journalists who produce our newspapers and TV news. But there was no such professional journalism industry in the late 1700s when the First Amendment was written.

When the First Amendment refers to "the press" it is referring to the means of publication. The First Amendment simply says that Congress is not allowed to "abridge" the rights of the American people to use the means of publication.

In that era, the main means of publishing was a printing press. Today, it's a printing press, a radio or TV broadcast tower, a cellphone video camera, a satellite uplink, a blog or a YouTube account.

There's an old cliche that "freedom of the press" belongs to the one who owns the press. Back when the First Amendment was written, few people could afford a printing press. Today, thanks to blogs, YouTube, broadband and cheap digital cameras, almost any American can afford to own the modern day equivalent of a printing press.

The debate over whether bloggers and other web-empowered citizens are covered by the First Amendment is silly. The First Amendment covers Americans, not "journalists" and it even covers Americans who blog, no matter whether they are blogging the local school board meetings that their local chain-owned daily stopped covering a long time ago, or they're writing about their cat or they're posting angry rants about their government or anything else on their blog.

Actually, today's bloggers and web publishers are much, much closer to what the Founding Fathers knew as the publishers of their day than are today's corporate mass-media, journalistic industries. The published media of the colonial era was nothing like today's ostensibly "objective" news media - rather it was characterized by partisan pamphleteers and independent political activists, advocates and muckrackers.

Technology aside, the authors of the First Amendment would more likely have envisioned today's bloggers than today's mainstream media.