Let’s Talk about “The Press”

On the Long Prompts page, I’ll put a conversation I recently had with ChatGPT about the press. I’m pretty sure, after donning a small hat over my little Constitutional Scholar brain thing, that “of the press” refers to a category of freedom that we all enjoy as individuals. It does not recognize some collective identity of humans. The later (recognition of “the press” as a group of persons) did not congeal jurisprudentially until well into the 20^th Century, and then just barely. I bring this up because I was idly drawn to a headline about ‘Citizen Journalism,’ and ended up at the Wikipedia page on said notion. Sad that we have the term Citizen Journalist, as it serves to highlight the existence of a supposedly professional press. Heck, it’s sad that we have the term ‘journalist.” I’m a fan of The Citizen Free Press aggregator site, as I’m sure many of you are. “Citizen.” “Free.”  “Press.”  Nice. Journalist? Not so nice. In order to exercise the freedoms to explore, discover, question, and opine (especially about things political), nobody but nobody needs to have heard anything in any course with “journalism” in its title. Nobody at CNN or who works for the AP or UPI, or any of those organizations, has any enhanced freedom of speech or of the press beyond what you and I have. What they enjoy is a strength in resources that gained them some additional access to government. In this Internet age, it is no longer needed that government give favored access to specific organizations due to the latter having greater broadcast capacity on some electromagnetic bandwidths. Our access to the Internet enables us to delete “press” as a category of people with any special jurisprudential standing at all. We best do that. Too many organizations have turned the words “press” and “journalist” into synonyms for “propaganda” and “partisan” — anti-American at that.