In 2021, the legal scholars RonNell Andersen Jones and Sonja West published a study tracking the Supreme Court’s references to the press in its opinions over time. The data they uncovered tells a striking story. While, in a five-year period beginning in 1970, the court’s opinions contained nearly 1,500 paragraphs that mentioned the press, that number decreased precipitously and was under 100 from 2015-2019.
Those figures are illustrative of a broader trend in the court’s First Amendment jurisprudence. While the First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” it seems that second clause has become increasingly inconsequential, even in cases where matters of journalism and newsgathering are concerned.
“I think the main reason it’s been sidelined is that the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech has been read broadly,” the legendary First Amendment litigator Floyd Abrams, who co-founded a project aimed at reviving the press clause, told SCOTUSblog. “And so in many cases, the press and all other speakers or writers are in exactly the same boat and receive the same sort of legal protection.”
So how, if at all, has the Supreme Court interpreted the press clause in ways that might distinguish the rights of journalists from those of ordinary speakers? And where has it refused to extend additional privileges to the press?
Perhaps the closest example of the court providing the institutional press with specific protections is a string of cases pertaining to selective taxation against newspapers. Back in 1936, the court decided Grosjean v. American Press Co., which concerned the constitutionality of a Louisiana law that levied a 2% tax on publications engaged in printed advertising with a circulation of at least 20,000 copies per week “for the privilege of engaging in such business in this State.” The tax was pushed through by then-Senator and former Governor Huey Long, who still had an iron grip on the state’s political system and called the policy a “tax on lying.” The 13 newspapers which the tax applied to challenged the law on First Amendment grounds.
The court unanimously struck it down. “[The tax] is bad because, in the light of its history and of its present setting, it is seen to be a deliberate and calculated device in the guise of a tax to limit the circulation of information to which the public is entitled in virtue of the constitutional guaranties,” Justice George Sutherland wrote in a majority opinion. “A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves.”
Slightly less than 50 years later, in 1983, the court reaffirmed that precedent in Minneapolis Star v. Minnesota Comm’r. There, Minnesota applied a 4% use tax on ink and paper to print publications but exempted the first $100,000 of ink and paper costs in a calendar year. Even though the court found no evidence that Minnesota had any particular censorious motive akin to Long’s in Grosjean, it found the law to be unconstitutional in an 8-1 decision. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her majority opinion that the structure of the tax which singled out both the press as a class and a smaller subset of newspapers for special treatment violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedom.
Another important case involving the press clause is 1974’s Miami Herald Pub. Co. v. Tornillo, in which the court struck down a law requiring newspapers to print political candidates’ responses to critical coverage. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for a unanimous court that the statute imposed a content-based penalty on newspapers, “exacted in terms of the cost in printing and composing time and materials and in taking up space that could be devoted to other material the newspaper may have preferred to print.” Yet, while the court in that instance ruled on press clause grounds, its logic followed a similar formulation that it has often used in cases involving compelled speech, which generally triggers strict scrutiny (under which the government must show its action is necessary to achieve a compelling purpose).
“I don’t think that there’s a legal distinction other than this is the press,” Dominic Coletti, a Program Officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Student Press Freedom Initiative, said to SCOTUSblog on the Tornillo ruling. “They talk about freedom of the press and the press clause and hold that the Florida statute violated the guarantee of free press, but it’s the same compelled speech issue that you would have in any other context.”
Indeed, the most famous and consequential Supreme Court cases involving journalism have largely collapsed the speech and press clauses into a single doctrine protecting the right to disseminate information.
New York Times v. Sullivan, the foundational 1964 libel case which established the “actual malice” standard for defaming public figures, involved an advertisement printed by the New York Times supporting Martin Luther King Jr. and criticizing the Montgomery, Alabama, police department’s suppression of civil rights protests. Justice William Brennan’s majority opinion used phrases to the effect of “freedom of speech and of the press” on six separate occasions, but carved out little distinction between them. In 1976’s Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart, the court unanimously held that a Nebraska trial judge’s order restraining members of the press from reporting on a defendant’s confessions to law enforcement during his murder trial was an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech. Chief Justice Burger wrote for the majority that “prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.”
Two years later, Justice Lewis Powell grappled with the apparent lack of distance between the two clauses in First Nat’l Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, arguing that the history of the press clause did not suggest the framers meant to confer any rights upon the “institutional press” not enjoyed by other publishers of information. “The Speech Clause, standing alone, may be viewed as a protection of the liberty to express ideas and beliefs, while the Press Clause focuses specifically on the liberty to disseminate expression broadly,” Powell wrote. But then he pushed back on that theory, adding: “[T]here is no fundamental distinction between expression and dissemination. The liberty encompassed by the Press Clause, although complementary to and a natural extension of Speech Clause liberty, merited special mention simply because it had been more often the object of official restraints.”
What is notably absent from Powell’s characterization is a discussion of whether the press clause might protect specific newsgathering activities from government intrusion, such as the right to access particular spaces of public importance or to protect the identity of confidential sources. In this area, press freedom advocates have suffered notable losses before the Supreme Court.
In 1972’s Branzburg v. Hayes, the court held that journalists do not have a First Amendment right to refuse grand jury testimony that would require them to identify confidential sources. Two years later, in Pell v. Procunier, a majority of the court upheld a prison rule prohibiting journalists from holding face-to-face interviews with select inmates, rejecting the theory that the press clause guarantees a special “right of access to prisons or their inmates beyond that afforded the general public.” And, in 1978’s Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, the court ruled that the police could conduct a search of a newspaper’s premises with a valid warrant (there, for photographs that might aid a prosecution), even if the newspaper itself was not suspected of a crime.
Those defeats, combined with the gradual decline of the press clause’s influence, inspired Abrams and Sandra Baron, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Abrams Institute for Free Expression, to launch the Press Clause Project. The project’s initial report issued a series of proposals for revitalizing the press clause’s legal teeth. The report called for the courts to “recalibrate the relationship between laws of general applicability and newsgathering rights,” including by revisiting its decisions in Branzburg and Zurcher. Among the proposals it offered: a requirement that public trials have some seats specifically reserved for the press, a protection for journalists against being removed from public gatherings by dispersal orders or curfews, and a right for journalists to view such things as state executions.
“The press clause seemed to have become an invisible, not simply neglected, but almost an invisible clause in the Constitution,” Baron told SCOTUSblog. “The press, the media bar, the public should be looking for ways to give constitutional life to this phrase, and to use it to protect journalism and journalists.”
One dilemma that arises from those recommendations is how to draw a legal distinction between who is and is not considered a journalist, especially in an age where any American can record a video on their iPhone and fire off a social media post to report on matters of public interest. Abrams and Baron recommended a test that considers criteria including whether the person or entity in question works for a news organization, has a history of news reporting, exercises editorial independence, and subjects their work to an editorial process. They pointed to several state journalist shield laws which define the press using multiple criteria as evidence that legal lines can be drawn distinguishing the press from other speakers.
Yet, while defining an institutional press might be necessary to implement the proposals outlined in the report, Coletti argues it is just as important to fight for reporting protections that apply across different levels of official media membership. “What we don’t want to see is a world in which access to those newsgathering protections is cut off, where we say there are people who have these protections because they work for a corporate news outlet or they have the right freelancing credentials, and then there are people who don’t,” Coletti said. “What we want is a broad protection for newsgathering, which is a fundamental part of being able to express what is happening.”
Based on the recent history of the Supreme Court’s press clause jurisprudence, such newsgathering protections are unlikely to expand anytime soon.
Recommended Citation: Eli Kronenberg, Has the Supreme Court rendered the First Amendment’s press clause invisible?, SCOTUSblog (Aug. 27, 2026, 10:00 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/08/has-the-supreme-court-rendered-the-first-amendments-press-clause-invisible/