3.4 First Amendment: Freedom of the Press

The freedom of the press is also a part of the First Amendment. It states that citizens have the right to publish and disperse information and opinions without the censorship of the government.

Freedom of the press has been greatly disputed over the years. An example of this is during the 1971 Pentagon Papers scandal. The Pentagon Papers were a secret report of American involvement in Vietnam that was leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a reporter at the NY Times. 

That lead to the Supreme Court Case of New York Times v. United States (1971) where the government tried to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers by stating that the release violated the Espionage Act of 1917 and that they had the power to use prior restraint (the suppression of harmful information).

The Supreme Court ruled that the newspaper could publish the papers without prior restraint because their publishing did not lead to the “inevitable, direct, and immediate event imperiling the safety of American forces.”