Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-2024
Abstract
In an era when the press faces unprecedented challenges, those who believe in the importance of a free press find themselves playing defense. Press advocates have been forced to articulate, with renewed clarity and urgency, why the press is not merely important but vital to an effective democracy and why it needs to be saved from a “death spiral” and an “extinction-level event.” These arguments often focus on the crucial role the press plays—the “press function,” as lawyers call it—in informing the public, holding power to account, and facilitating democratic discourse.
Scholars and commentators generally discuss the press function through one of two lenses. Legal scholars tend to describe the press function through existing Supreme Court doctrine in which the Court has told us that the press serves as a watchdog, an educator, and a proxy for the public. Political theorists, meanwhile, situate the press within our overall democratic structure, explaining that a free press is integral to democracy.
These explanations are fundamental. But they are also insufficient, especially in an age when delegitimizing the press is a political tactic. To deliver the press from extinction, the public needs not only to know what the press does, it needs to care. This means that beyond conceptualizing the press function as a matter of doctrine and theory, press advocates must conceptualize it as a matter of rhetoric. This essay explains how this work might be done.
Publication Citation
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University Essay Series and forthcoming in The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times (Cambridge University Press).
Scholarly Commons Citation
Carroll, Erin C., "Press Benefits and the Public Imagination" (2024). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 2623.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/2623