What "the Press" Meant in 1791

When the First Amendment was ratified in 1791, it guaranteed "the freedom of speech, or of the press." Today, the word "press" tends to call up a particular picture: reporters, newsrooms, the news media as a profession and an industry. We speak of "the press" the way we speak of "the bar" or "the academy," as a body of credentialed people who do a recognized job.

That is not what the word meant in 1791, and the difference is not a small one. To the founding generation, "the press" was not a profession. It was a machine. This essay is about that machine, and about why understanding the original meaning of the word changes how you understand the freedom attached to it.

In 1791, a press was a physical object. It was the printing press, a heavy, ink-stained apparatus of wood and iron that pressed inked type onto paper. It was a piece of technology, and a fairly recent and revolutionary one by the standards of human history.

What that machine did was singular. Before the printing press, a person who wanted to share an idea broadly had almost no way to do it. They could speak, and be heard by whoever was within earshot. They could write a letter, and reach one reader. To reach hundreds or thousands of people, to put the same words in front of a whole community, was simply not available to an ordinary person.

The printing press changed that. It let one person reproduce their words, many times over, and put them into many hands. Newspapers, pamphlets, handbills, broadsides, books, these were what came off the press, and together they were the first technology of mass communication. The press was, quite literally, the device by which a private thought became a public one.

So when the First Amendment protects "the freedom of the press," the most accurate way to hear the phrase, in 1791, is this: the freedom to operate that machine. The freedom to use the technology of mass reproduction without the government's permission.

To see why the founders cared so much, you have to know what they were protecting the press from.

England had a long history of controlling the press, and the colonists had inherited that history. Beginning in the 1500s, English law required printing presses to be licensed. You could not simply own a press and use it. You needed the government's approval, and the government could withhold it, or revoke it, or dictate what the press was permitted to produce. A licensed press is a press the government controls. The licenser sits between the writer and the public and decides what may pass.

The founding generation knew this system intimately, and they regarded it as a tool of tyranny. They had also seen, in their own colonial experience, what it looked like when a printer defied the authorities, the trial of John Peter Zenger in 1735, which an earlier essay in this series examined, was exactly such a case. A free press, to the founders, meant a press free of the licenser. It meant that a person could own the machine, ink the type, and publish, and the government could not require them to ask first. That is why the founders called a free press, in the language of the day, one of the great bulwarks of liberty.

Here is the consequence that matters most, and it follows directly from the press being a machine rather than a profession.

If "the press" is a technology, then the freedom of the press belongs to anyone who uses that technology. It is not a special privilege handed to a particular guild of professional newsmen. The pamphleteer working alone, the political club printing handbills, the ordinary citizen who saved up to buy a press and print their views, all of them were exercising the freedom of the press, because all of them were using the press. The freedom attached to the act of publishing, not to a job title.

This is supported by how the phrase has been understood across American history. The freedom of the press has long been read as a freedom for all who use the press to reach a wide audience, not as a protection reserved for an institutional press industry. It is, in this sense, a deeply democratic freedom. It does not ask whether you are a credentialed journalist. It asks only whether you are publishing.

That understanding also explains how the freedom has survived enormous technological change. The founders protected the press as a technology of mass communication. When new technologies arrived that did the same job, that let an ordinary person reach a large, unseen audience, the freedom was understood to extend to them. The machine changes. The function does not. Whatever lets a person broadcast their ideas widely is, for constitutional purposes, doing what the printing press did in 1791.

Recovering the original meaning of "the press" is not a historical nicety. It changes what the freedom is, and who has it.

If "the press" means an industry, then the freedom of the press starts to sound like a professional perk, something held by news organizations, of concern mainly to journalists. If "the press" means the technology of reaching a public, then the freedom of the press is something every citizen holds, simply by virtue of being able to publish to others. The first reading makes it a narrow guild privilege. The second makes it a universal civic right. The history points firmly to the second.

That is the thing worth carrying. The freedom of the press is not a benefit the Constitution grants to reporters. It is the right of any person to use the available means of mass communication to put their ideas before their fellow citizens, without first asking the government's leave. The founders protected a machine because the machine was how an ordinary voice became a public one. In every era since, the machine has changed and the principle has held. The freedom belongs to whoever is publishing, and in an age when nearly everyone can, that means it belongs, more fully than ever, to all of us.