The Modern Fight for Media Freedom in the United States

The First Amendment as a subject is challenging and provocative, and scholarly and popular understandings of it are changing. New communication technologies are pushing lawyers, judges, and scholars to revisit, and sometimes rethink, old legal doctrines and concepts. In the area of privacy, we have to think today about encryption and a website's terms of service. In the area of copyright, we have to think about peer-to-peer file sharing and the licenses granted by iTunes. In the area of sexual expression, we have to think about sexting, revenge porn, and deep fakes.' This is the emerging state of play for First Amendment law in our modern media landscape, in which PBS has a Pinterest board," the Associated Press once built a partnership with other news organizations to collect royalties from aggregators, and the "people formerly known as the audience," as New York University's Jay Rosen once put it regularly perform journalistic acts using their own smartphones. This is a media industry in which the gathering, production, and distribution of content is widely dispersed, and the ongoing challenge for First Amendment law is to keep up-to breathe life into the freedoms of speech and press, no matter the media of the day.