Ask the Declaration → Your rights, by who you are
Press freedom in the United States rides on the same sentence that protects everyone's speech, and it is one of the few places the founders named the press directly.
Descriptive, not legal advice · the founding documents' own words
Freedom of the press is named expressly, alongside speech, assembly, and petition. Prior restraint on publication faces the heaviest constitutional burden of all.
Protection against unreasonable searches, which bears on newsroom searches and the seizure of a reporter's materials.
The right to a public trial, the constitutional hook for press and public access to courtrooms.
Applies these protections against the states, and supplies the due-process backbone of modern press-freedom cases.