How Has the Press Historically Made Its Freedom?

This chapter argues that the press has never been a single, stable entity but instead has been an ever-changing product of a field of dynamic forces. The press is not a solitary entity that has freedom from anything but is an ongoing product of separations and dependencies. Press freedom is better thought of as a network state whose legitimacy depends on its normative conceptions of publics. Instead of asking whether a static model of the press deserves its freedom from an unknown set of influences to pursue a right to speak, this question should be flipped on its head: what subset of relationships making up the press creates a public we want to defend normatively, and how can we redefine press freedom as the separations and dependencies that make those relationships and those publics possible?

How Free Is the Networked Press?

This chapter traces where the networked press exists today. Based on a seven-year corpus (2010–2016) of journalistic trade press focused on sociotechnical dynamics, it describes how the networked press' autonomy exists in twelve sociotechnical dynamics: observation, production, alignments, labor, analytics, timing, security, audiences, revenue, facts, resemblances, and affect. It argues that networked press freedom is the story of people and machines coming together and pulling away from often invisible and unacknowledged assumptions about what kind of press publics need. By seeing itself as a set of sociotechnical separations and dependencies, the press may better be able to decide and defend what kinds of publics it can create.

How Is Networked Press Freedom a Question of Infrastructure?

This chapter aims to trace the broadcast origins of press freedom, connect them to journalism's early computational tools and practices, and show how these influenced thinking about press freedom and social media. The main goal, though, is to argue that contemporary press freedom involves sociotechnical work. This is not only because today's news work involves connecting with diverse systems of people and machines but, more fundamentally, because the power to make publics—ideally, the press' chief concern—exists in subtle, often invisible, but always powerful relationships between humans and nonhumans that define the conditions under which shared consequences can be seen. The chapter shows that because publics arise from infrastructures of people and machines, so too must press freedom.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book challenges the myth that if we just get out of the way of good journalists and let them tell truth to power, they will produce the information that vibrant democracies need. It complicates the idea of press freedom and shows that it emerges not from individual heroes but from social, technological, institutional, and normative forces that vie for power, imagine publics, and implicitly fight for visions of democracy. Press freedom is viewed as a concept to think with—a generative and constructive tool for looking at any given era of the press and public life and asking, is this version of press freedom giving us the kind of publics we need? If not, how do we revise the institutional arrangements underpinning press freedom and make a different thing that we agree to call ‘the press’?

Conclusion

This chapter presents the author's reflections on how the model of networked press autonomy discussed in the previous chapters might be used by journalists, technologists, regulators, designers, educators, and audiences. The networked press is infrastructure that touches on nearly all aspects of society, so any reforms that are made to the press will require engaging with a wide range of actors and various types of power. It is argued that democratic autonomy and self-governance mean more than individuals being free from unreasonable constraints. To realize ourselves more fully, we need not only the right to access information, share opinions, and choose associations. We also need to see ourselves as publics—and question whether our publics have capacities to hear people and ideas that we would not choose to encounter.

What Kind of Press Freedom Does Democracy Need?

This chapter constructs a normative case for press freedom grounded in the idea of a public right to hear, a little examined cornerstone of democratic life. It develops this claim in four ways. First, it argues that the idea of democratic autonomy requires seeing individual freedom as a product of social relationships. Second, it reviews the demands that this view of autonomy makes on free speech, arguing that autonomy requires more than individual expression in marketplaces of speech. Third, it describes a structural, institutional model of the press, grounded in an affirmative interpretation of the First Amendment and a review of relevant U.S. Supreme Court cases to show that there is a basis in law for seeing the press as an institution that could be dedicated to ensuring a public right to hear. Finally, it uses recent literature on the democratic value of listening to argue that the thoughtful absence of speech can be part of a rich system of public communication.