Supreme Court of the United States

The Constitu- tion’s guarantee of freedom of the press does not assume that the press will be “objective,” and to allow the government power to draw legal lines around the press based on the government’s determination of “ob- jectivity” is unworkable in principle. [...] Nothing in the Constitution or its history suggests that the freedom of the press may be curtailed based on the “objectivity” or “credibility” of the person in- volved. [...] The entire prem- ise of the First Amendment’s protections is that it is up to the reader or the listener to judge the objectivity of the writing or the speech at issue, and to make up his or her own mind accordingly. [...] Historians debate precisely when the concept of objectivity came to be valued as a journalistic ideal— whether it was in the middle of the nineteenth century, Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism 7 (1981), or after World War I, Schudson, supra, at 7—but in any event, it was well after the First Amendment preserved in the Constitution “the freedom. [...] Thomas Jefferson, who complained frequently and loudly about what he called the abuses of the partisan press in his day—saying that “our newspapers for the most part, present only the caricatures of disaffected minds”—nonetheless believed that it was “better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood.” Letter to M.