“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom…of the press.”
The First Amendment has always been a proving ground for young voices.
From underground papers in the 1960s to zines in the 1980s, students have used the press to push boundaries and question power. Today at FAU, the same challenge remains: how far will students go to use their rights?
What it Protects
Freedom of the press protects against prior restraints: the Court reviews “any system of prior restraints of expression” with “a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity.” It also protects press and public access to criminal trials, recognizing a “right of access to trials.” And it guards against targeted burdens, because laws “targeting the press,” or treating subsets of media differently, “may sometimes violate the First Amendment.”
What it Doesn’t Protect
The Free Press Clause does not grant special access to government information; it “does not confer on the press the power to compel government to furnish information or otherwise give the press access to information that the public generally does not have.” It does not provide a constitutional privilege to ignore generally applicable laws; “generally applicable laws do not offend the First Amendment simply because their enforcement against the press has incidental effects.” The Court has also declined to recognize an absolute reporter’s privilege before a grand jury (Branzburg v. Hayes). And defamation law still applies: for public officials and public figures, the Constitution requires “actual malice,” meaning publication “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard” for the truth.
A campus moment
For Michael Koretzky, SPJ Ethics Chair and one of OutFAU’s advisors, that episode captured the real power of the First Amendment: freedom of the press doesn’t depend on resources or institutional backing. It depends on students daring to use it.
Why it Matters and What’s at Stake
As OutFAU publishes its special issue on the First Amendment, freedom of the press feels both more vital and fragile than ever. While past generations of young people turned their distrust of mainstream media into alternative zines and underground papers, Koretzky says many of today’s students simply disengage.
Koretzky believes this indifference has real consequences. “College-aged kids today, Gen Z and millennials, are pissed off at older generations for making it almost unaffordable to live, for locking them into bullshit jobs,” he said. “But the residual effect of that is they don’t trust institutions. They don’t trust the media either, so they don’t value freedom of the press like young people did earlier.”
The 1960s and 70s saw students creating alternative newspapers to challenge mainstream narratives. The 80s brought punk-inspired zines and independent magazines that channeled skepticism into creativity. Even when young people distrusted “the media,” they built their own.
Today, Koretzky argues, social media has changed that dynamic. Instead of creating their own press, students often just log off. “They just disengage from it, which is obviously the wrong attitude,” he said.
That disengagement worries him because it turns freedom of the press into a passive concept rather than an active tool. He draws a parallel between how Americans perceive Congress: people often say they hate Congress, but they tend to like their local representative. “The media is the same way,” he said. “They think nationally, but they should like their own local newspaper, their own campus newspaper, the place where they could make a difference.”
For Koretzky, the lesson is that student journalists can’t wait for someone else to defend free expression. “If you don’t like what’s written, you don’t have to sit around complaining. You can start your own press,” he said. That, he believes, is what college should teach students: not to treat freedoms as abstract rights, but to practice them.
That perspective resonates as most Americans (73%) say freedom of the press is highly important to the well-being of society, according to a 2024 Pew Research survey. Many expressed concerns in the survey on the influence of political and financial interests on news organizations.
Koretzky sees both a challenge and an opportunity: the challenge is countering cynicism; the opportunity is showing that journalism at the campus level still matters.
“When you do good reporting and you make people mad, that’s education,” Koretzky said. “That’s what college is supposed to be.”
The Bottom Line
Freedom of the press isn’t just a protection written into the First Amendment. On campuses like FAU, it’s a call to action, to write, to publish, to challenge, and to create spaces where disagreement sharpens ideas rather than silences them. For student journalists, the freedom is real only if they choose to use it.
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