Replies

I’ve never heard this argument used before. Our right to listen. It seems so obvious now. What good is freedom of speech if there isn’t anyone free to listen?

Yes, it's obvious that your right to speak would be mooted by punishment of anyone who listened to you.
The framers of the Constitution initially opposed the Bill of Rights, not because they opposed the rights in any such bill, but because they feared that any bill of rights which could be devised would inevitably omit reference to some rights - and that the existence of a bill of rights would be used to denigrate rights not enumerated in that list. My understanding is that because of that it is established jurisprudence that the body of the Constitution is to be read as protecting everything in the Bill of Rights even without the first ten amendments. I believe that both "liberal" and "conservative" justices would tell you that.
If you read the Constitution that way, the words "the press" fade out, and words like "No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States" (Article 1 Section 9) come into focus. Because what the Associated Press and its membership has done is to lobby for a title of nobility - "the press" - which gives them privileges to be withheld from the people. "The freedom of . . . the press" is actually the right of the people to spend their own money to use technology to promote their own (political, religious, and other) opinions.
If you do not read "the press" as a ceiling on our rights, and if you read in Article 1 Section 8 that the federal government is explicitly authorized
"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,"
you will find in the Constitution no warrant for the claim that the framers of the Constitution expected no advances in the arts of communication and that therefore the Constitution does not cover high speed presses, photography, telegraphy, telephony, sound recording, radio, mimeograph machines, movies, talking movies, television, photocopiers, hi-fi steros, computer/printer combinations, Compact Disks, HDTV, DVDs, satellite radio, the Internet and the worldwide web - or whatever comes next.
It is in my experience a great mistake to try to prove that journalism is not objective - for the simple reason that that is a political opinion. You would do just as well to expect to be able, in an hour's conversation, to convert a Democrat to a Republican. My point is not the mere fact that I can cite examples of tendentiousness in journalism until the cows come home, and my point is not simply that no one can prove that journalism is objective because lack of bias is an unprovable negative. My point is that I have a right to listen to Rush Limbaugh, provided only that he makes his program available to me on terms that I am able and willing to meet, without reference to what a politician or judge, or all of them, think of Rush Limbaugh's opinions. Just as surely as your garden variety "sheeple" has a right to listen to Katie Couric. A government which distinguishes between the two is not operating under the Constitution.
I pulled some of the above from this thread posting. The thread itself is a vanity of mine which is germane to your chosen topic. Some readers of which have been complimentary . . .
Here's a pingout for you . . .