The text of the First Amendment explicitly protects two foundational social institutions: religion and the press. Since 2021, however, the Supreme Court has increasingly granted one of these two institutions – religion – a status of heightened constitutional privilege. In contrast, current law treats the other First Amendment institution – the press – as wholly unexceptional. However, the press is defined – from newspapers to television and bloggers in pajamas to professional journalists – it receives no greater constitutional protections than any other speaker. The Court has essentially read the Press Clause out of the Constitution, voiding its specific textual commitment, despite the absence of any countervailing constitutional provision parallel to the Establishment Clause. Until religion law’s recent exceptional turn, the law’s treatment of religion and the press were in some sense parallel. Recently, they have diverged, as press law has not kept pace with changes in religion law. In this chapter, I argue that the press should be treated at least as constitutionally exceptional as religion, and I explore what such press exceptionalism might mean in practice.

What work could an independent Press Clause do apart from the work already done by the Speech Clause? This question requires us to think about why and how the press is different from other speakers for First Amendment purposes: what distinct functions does the press perform and what distinct vulnerabilities does the press possess? The press serves the public through its unique watchdog, educator, and proxy roles. These functions, in turn, explain the press’s distinct vulnerabilities to government retaliation: because the press’s primary purpose is to scrutinize the government for the public’s benefit, the government has long perceived the press as inherently threatening to its political self-interest. Rooted in distrust of the government’s self-interested efforts to punish and thus silence the press, negative theory offers an important tool for understanding the Press Clause as providing an especially robust shield from the government’s retaliation. By directing judicial attention to the reasons to distrust the government’s adverse treatment of the press, this chapter demonstrates how negative First Amendment theory can reinvigorate Press Clause doctrine by informing courts’ choices of legal rules, and by informing their application of those rules once chosen.

If the press can claim rights different from those guaranteed to every speaker, it must be because we understand the Press Clause to serve constitutional values different from the freedom of speech clause and because these values require distinct forms of rights for their protection. In this short chapter, I explore four distinct constitutional values that at various times have been claimed to be uniquely served by the press: 1) the value of public discourse, 2) the Meiklejohnian value of distributing information, 3) the checking value, and 4) the value of the public sphere. Each of these values yields a different constitutional definition of the “press,” and each might imply a different array of rights that ought to accrue to the press. Although these values are distinct, the press may simultaneously serve one or more of them.

This chapter examines how government entities determine who is a journalist to allocate resources under conditions of scarcity and to assure that the press can conduct its functions without undue government regulation and interference. Using a new dataset of 172 laws, rules, and procedures that different government entities have used to define the press, it describes the most common tests government entities use for identifying journalists and compares them to each other. The chapter then makes four normative recommendations about the tests government entities should use to define journalists. First, government entities should have explicit and meaningful standards for press exceptionalism. Second, most press exceptionalism should be limited to professional journalists who regularly produce news stories or commentary. Third, press exceptionalism should not turn on the type of technology used to communicate. Fourth, government entities should continue to have the power to grant press exceptionalism to “bona fide correspondents of repute in their profession” so long as they do not engage in viewpoint discrimination.

This chapter considers when the government’s speech about others’ speech violates the First Amendment’s Free Speech or Free Press Clauses. It starts by exploring how the government’s speech can change, deter, or punish its targets’ speech: think of the government’s threats, disclosures, and designations that silence its targets’ speech, or its expressive attacks that incite or encourage third parties to punish its targets for their speech. It then examines the expressive harms inflicted by the government’s speech that disparages disfavored speakers, and whether that speech infringes Free Speech or Free Press Clause protections apart from any adverse effect on its targets’ choices and opportunities. Finally, turning from the consequences of the government’s speech about speech to its motives, it considers whether the Constitution prohibits the government’s expressive choices motivated by its intent to silence or punish speech to which it objects or its intent to interfere with the press's constitutionally protected functions. To illuminate the three approaches’ various strengths and limitations, the chapter closes by applying them to a range of problems both real and hypothetical.