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The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
The trouble “with the First Amendment” is that we-the-people have been (frog in hot water style) gradually been weaned off of our belief in skepticism. We accepted - actually, our ancestors accepted long before we were born - the fatuous claims, first of the AP and then of its member presses, of “journalistic objectivity.” The trouble with “objective journalism” is that the “objective” journalist actually believes his own press clippings of his own objectivity - which clippings were written by fellow members of the mutual admiration society known as the AP.
But everyone - whether or not they are journalists - has incentives and motives, and therefore no one is automatically objective. It is possible and laudable, of course, to try to be objective, but any serious attempt at that must take due account of one’s own motives and incentives. And that is impossible to the person who actually believes that he is objective a priori. Joining a mutual admiration society like the AP forecloses the possibility of mounting a serious attempt at actual objectivity. Within the AP, of course, political correctness passes for objectivity. No thinking person should take such claims seriously, but American society has been gradually gulled into accepting them. Worse, public acceptance of those fatuous claims lead directly to acceptance of FCC regulation of broadcasting “in the public interest.” And FEC regulation of “campaign finance reform” - which is actually abridgment of “the freedom of . . . the press.”
Freedom of the press would be impossible without freedom to spend money without limit for ink, paper, and printing presses. Denigrate the idea of money as “speech” as you will, money freely spent for technology to propagate opinion is “the press.” And lest it be argued that “the framers didn’t anticipate radio, or TV, or the Internet,” in principle that is absurd in light of the Article 1 Section 8. constitutional provision that
The Congress shall have power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .
The framers designed the Constitution to produce a dynamic country, not one in which a particular technology such as the printing press would remain unchanged until a constitutional amendment was passed.