We cherish the idea that we clever Westerners have something called ‘freedom of the press’.

But what exactly does that expression mean? Does it mean that those who constitute the body of publishing folk who define themselves as ‘the press’ have special status and associated freedoms which may or may not be enjoyed by the rest of us mere citizens?

Or does it mean that everyone has (in principle) the right to find access to printing devices and then get stuff out there, ie the main newspapers and other large media outlets have no status separate from the rest of us?

I of course incline to the latter view. Indeed, perhaps unwisely I take it for granted.

The whole issue is complicated because once upon a time there was literally no way to get views circulated in any sort of written way other than by getting access to a printing press machine.

This really matters.

Why? Because it goes to the heart of any concept of democracy.

Is there an elite – a ‘mainstream media’ – who assume to themselves the right to have special freedoms denied to the rest of us? If such an elite group of opinion-formers has some sort of extra legal status, where does that leave laws aimed at defining what sort of speech is allowed during an election campaign, and by whom?

Plus, what happens when as in the USA the majority of mainstream media outlets act as blockers for one political tendency (currently the Obama Democrats)?

There was an interesting insight the other day, when a pro-Obama academic breezily proclaimed the Obama Administration impressively if not unprecedentedly scandal-free – by defining scandals as only those scandals which the mainstream media report!

Anyway, Volokh Conspiracy (leading US group law blog) takes a good look at rival interpretations of what ‘freedome of the press’ means in formal US legal/constitutional terms, and explains a lot:

But other judges and scholars — including the Citizens United majority and Justice Brennan — have argued that the “freedom … of the press” does not protect the press-as-industry, but rather protects everyone’s use of the printing press (and its modern equivalents) as a technology. People or organizations who occasionally rent the technology, for instance by buying newspaper space, broadcast time, or the services of a printing company, are just as protected as newspaper publishers or broadcasters…

Both sides in the debate often appeal at least partly to the constitutional text and its presumed original meaning. The words “the press” in the First Amendment must mean the institutional press, says one side. The words must mean press-as-technology, says the other. Citizens United is unlikely to settle the question, given how sharply the four dissenters and many outside commentators have disagreed with the majority.

So who is right? What light does the “history” referred to by the Citizens United dissent shed on the “text” and the Framers’ “purpose”?

The answer, it turns out, is that people during the Framing era likely understood the text as fitting the press-as-technology model — as securing the right of every person to use communications technology, and not just securing a right belonging exclusively to members of the publishing industry. The text was likely not understood as treating the press-as-industry differently from other people who wanted to rent or borrow the press-as-technology on an occasional basis.

Read the whole thing. It directly affects you both as a reader and as a potential publisher of your own thoughts on the Web or otherwise..

And if you are in any way interested in how the tension between mass printing and personal freedom first emerged, read an awesome book by Adrian Johns on the way mass publishing started. Note especially the startling scope of  cheating and stealing as printing presses became more widespread across Europe – Newton and other great scientists had huge problems stopping other brainy people elsewhere in England or on the Continent simply republishing their work and claiming it as their own.

This, by the way, explains why Parliament proclaimed that a copy of every book published had to be sent to the British Museum and other grand ‘legal deposit’ institutions – there had to be at least one verifiable original against which fraudsters’ work might be measured.

The way everyone tried to take advantage of the surging technologies of the day back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is eerily reminiscent of the myriad problems we now face in dealing with Internet piracy and so on.

Adrian Johns explains all this in a magnificent way. I bought his book on the subject while I was at Harvard in 1997 and stupidly lent it to someone, never to get it back.

So in writing this blog post I have just reordered a copy via Amazon. I warmly recommend you do the same – a true book about books: