The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The principle here is that news media and individual citizens of a well-functioning republic need to be free to criticize their government and speak their views. This means that, even when speech is offensive, the government cannot ban it, punish it, or restrict it, except under very rare circumstances. Interestingly, this doesn’t mean that the U.S. government hasn’t tried to exercise control over media content. But its attempts at regulation are often struck down by the courts as unconstitutional (such as bans on pornography and heavy regulation of political campaign speech). The regulations that U.S. courts allow mostly involve rules about technical issues, such as broadcast signals or ownership of stations and copyright laws. In effect, the U.S. government actually has little direct influence on media content compared to the governments of other countries.

Do all of the U.S. media benefit from this protection? The courts have generally held that creative expression is protected speech, whether in print, on TV, in movies, or on the Internet. However, the courts have also upheld some content regulations for some kinds of media, particularly broadcasting, as we’ll see in the next section.