"the right of the people peacably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances" is, quite explicitly, the right to talk to each other about politics."the freedom of speech, and of the press" must accordingly be understood to include political speech and printing.
The internet didn't exist in the founding era, but its distinguishing characteristic is low-cost, high-accessibility publishing. The press was the lowest-cost way of publishing in the founding era, and the internet arose as a mass medium just as Bill Bradley started caterwalling about "the poor man's soap box" being overwhelmed by "the rich man's wallet." To suppress the internet, therefore, would be precisely counter to the patent intention of the First Amendment.The case is otherwise, however, with broadcasting. The FCC created the broadcast spectrum ("the public airwaves") by censoring the public at large. The FCC promotes the ability of the people at large to receive but not to send broadcast transmissions. The right to "receive"--to read or listen--is implicit in the right to print or speak. But there can be no "constitutional right" to a clear-channel oligopoly license to broadcast.
Consequently the FCC's mission of endorsing certain licensees and not we-the-people is constitutionally illegitimate. A powerful case can be made (e.g., Slander) that journalism is anticonservative. The New York Times has the constitutional right to be anticonservative (even while claiming to be objective); that frees the courts from any obligation to vet its pages for "fairness" or "objectivity", or any such formulation.
But with its scheme of preferences for the speech of the few, the FCC takes on exactly that burden. And if taken seriously it is a Sisyphusean task, because absence of bias is an unprovable negative. Accordingly the FCC has never truly taken its obligation seriously.
The "Fairness Doctrine" simply took mainstream journalism as gospel, as if The New York Times had taken an oath to publish "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The trouble is, of course, that the First Amendment protects the Times from any such obligation--and that, even where such obligation prevails, sometimes people are found guilty of perjury.
In addition to presuming to regulate the print press other than journalism, McCain-Feingold essentially institutes that form of broadcast "fairness" during the climatical period of an election. It cries out, not merely for SCotUS rebuke, but for a finding that broadcast journalism is an illegitimate political Establishment. That is, journalism should lose influence during the crucial stage of an election, rather than being promoted to an unchallengable Establishment during that period.