Abstract
A half-century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court often praised speakers performing the press function. While the Justices acknowledged that press reports are sometimes inaccurate and that media motivations are at times less than public-serving, their laudatory statements nonetheless embraced a baseline presumption of the value and trustworthiness of press speech in general. Speech in the exercise of the press function, they told us, is vitally important to public discourse in a democracy and therefore worthy of protection even when it falls short of the ideal in a given instance. Those days are over. Our study of every reference to the press function in the history of the Court reveals that the Justices’ positive assumptions about press-speaker trustworthiness—and the benefit of the doubt that accompanied them—have vanished. Yet, for other types of speakers, the presumption of trustworthiness remains and is perhaps stronger than ever. The Roberts Court Justices continue to indulge a generous starting premise for an array of other expressive actors, regardless of the value of their speech or the potential that their speech was the product of less-than-public-serving motives. This contrast provides important insight into both the future protection of the democracy-enhancing press function and the ways that the Roberts Court is leaving certain types of speech outside the ambit of its much-touted expansion of speaker protection.
Repository Citation
RonNell Anderson Jones and Sonja R. West,
Presuming Trustworthiness
, 75 Fla. L. Rev. 799
(2023),
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/1551
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This article was originally uploaded in SSRN.