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Something profound is happening to the right to gather news. Don Lemon is on trial for covering an anti-ICE demonstration. A Washington Post reporter’s home was searched and her devices seized by the FBI. Last week, Stephen Colbert’s interview with a Democratic politician from Texas was barred from the airwaves by CBS on vanishingly thin claims about equal time.

On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick spoke to two scholars and researchers, Sonja West and RonNell Andersen Jones, about the press clause of the First Amendment. Their recent book, The Future of Press Freedom: Democracy, Law, and the News in Changing Times, is a vital read for anybody who cares about this battered pillar of democracy. Sonja West is the Otis Brumby distinguished professor in First Amendment law at the University of Georgia Law School. RonNell Andersen Jones is a university distinguished professor and the Lee E. Teitelbaum chair in law at the University of Utah. Both have been visiting research scholars at the Knight First Amendment Institute. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Whenever we talk about First Amendment freedoms, we tend to skip over the press clause, and race to speech and assembly, and yet, the press clause is actually its own unique bulwark against tyrannical government. Can you walk us through what it is the Framers were thinking when they named us and said, “You’re special”?

Sonja West: The First Amendment very explicitly says that among our other wonderful freedoms we have explicit protections for freedom of the press. The Supreme Court has spent a lot of time talking about the First Amendment, and yet for some reason, the freedom of the press has not gotten the same kind of attention. I often refer to freedom of speech as the Supreme Court’s favorite child, while the press clause, the freedom of the press, is the neglected child. It is the one that seems to be standing quietly in the corner that the court never talks about, certainly increasingly never talks about anymore, does not imbue with wonderful gifts of powers to be able to do wonderful things to make sure we all have this important protection.

This is perplexing if you look at the history, because the Framers were not exactly clear about precisely what they meant when they were giving us this right of a free press, but they were extremely clear that they thought it was incredibly important. In fact, James Madison referred to it as one of the three great rights he considered protected in the Constitution, higher, even among others. It was far more prominent in the discussions in the Constitutional Convention and in early state constitutions than the freedom of speech. Nine out of the 11 states that adopted revolutionary constitutions included protections for freedom of the press. Only one included protections for freedom of speech.

When it came to creating this new government, rebelling against and pushing back against restrictions we had experienced under English common law, press freedom was seen to be essential. And it was not just an individual right—like the individual freedom we celebrate when it comes to freedom of speech—but a structural right. We saw it repeatedly called a bulwark of liberty. It was m​​eant to be something there to push back against government power and to be informed in a way that would allow the people to effectively self-govern. And yet over time it has blurred with freedom of speech into this concept of free expression, but increasingly just disappeared.

You wrote this very prescient article in the New York Times in 2017, “Don’t Expect the First Amendment to Protect the Media.” You warned that what we believed to be hard and fast rules protecting the free press were really just soft norms. Were the........

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