New production techniques also inspired the serious press of the ruling classes. These newspapers could also expand into the broader marketplace, and the elite funding these papers could use their huge print runs to cultivate the tastes of the masses through advertising, and the political will of the people through clever reporting. A semblance of objectivity was again required, in order to maximize readership, and to better influence public opinion. A split occurred between the popular press and the more highbrow press; the popular entertained, and the highbrow "informed." The latter only printed "the news that's fit to print."

Michael Schudson, professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, explains that the New York Times "established itself as the 'higher journalism' because it adapted to the life experience of persons whose position in the social structure gave them the most control over their own lives." [12] If the media truly is a "watchdog" or even a distinct part of the polity designed to influence the government, then highbrow papers like the Times fulfill the same role as the old political papers of the Founders. They allow a small, elite segment of the population greater influence. As Alexander Hamilton, one of the more brutally honest of the Founders said, "All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people... Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government." [13] Ironically enough, one of the papers founded by Hamilton, the New York Post, has a lot more in common with the penny presses of the urban rabble than the post-colonial gazettes of the ruling elite.

Whose First Amendment? Our First Amendment!

Now what? People in the United States are quite free to publish (if they can afford to) and even freer to read a wider variety of material than most people on the planet. The vision of the Founders was severely shortsighted. The First Amendment and the Bill of Rights are best seen as realpolitik maneuvering, not posthumous approval of your assumed right to buy a copy of D-Cups at the 7-11. The average daily newspaper had precious little to do with the expansion of First Amendment rights, either. Most of them are designed to deliver the apolitical and economically non-influential segment of the American population (i.e. lots of us) into the hands of advertisers—advertisers who are, of course, busy reading The Wall Street Journal, not the New York Post.

The Supreme Court has had a lot to say about freedom of speech (and through extension, the press) in the past century. The standard conception of the Supreme Court as an apolitical body puzzling over the Constitution and mysteriously reading between the lines of this living (and sometimes squirming and mewling) document in search of fair-minded decisions is false. The Supreme Court has flip-flopped, turned backflips, and vibrated itself through walls to manipulate the First Amendment and its protections.

The creation of advertiser-friendly "objectivity" in reportage allowed the print media to claim the role of watchdog. In order to protect this role, the laws which allowed the government to control the press via "prior restraint" (blocking a publication before it can be made public) were challenged and struck down. In the first serious challenge to prior restraint, Near v. Minnesota (1931), the Supreme Court struck down a Minnesota law that had been used to silence the pro-Klan Saturday Press. For the most part though, radical points of view were not so lucky in this century.

Since the press was now an objective watchdog, polemics, pamphlets, radical newspapers, and articles used to organize dissent and resistance were not considered part of the press at all. Instead, they were merely "speech" and could thus be repressed by the government without upsetting the delicate balance between the power of the state and the public's need for a tame and corporate-owned news industry. Prior restraint precedents protected most mainstream papers and a pro-Klan scandal sheet from censorship, but did not come into play against an entire class of publications which were freely attacked by the government, in spite of the fact that the press as the Founders knew it consisted largely of such polemical pamphlets and news sheets. The middle-of-the-road corporate media were granted the legal protections designed for a revolutionary press, and the state exiled radical thought to the risky hinterlands of seditious speech in a way not dissimilar from the old Sedition Act.

Charles T. Schenck was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for distributing a leaflet urging young men to resist the World War I draft. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction in Schenck v. US (1919), claiming that the federal government has the right to suppress speech (though a leaflet is as much a form as press as anything else) if that speech posed a "clear and present danger" to the nation (read: the government). Also in 1919, Abrams v US saw the court uphold the conviction of a Bolshevik immigrant who prepared a leaflet urging resistance to the US's involvement in the Russian Civil War.

The Supreme Court also upheld the conviction of Benjamin Gitlow under New York's old anarchy law, which prohibited people from advocating the overthrow of the government. In Gitlow v. New York (1925), the Supreme Court actually developed a looser test for the state’s right to ban certain ideas. Instead of a clear and present danger, there only needed to be a "bad tendency" to drive people toward illegal action. By the mid-1920s, the Palmer raids and America's first Red Scare had crippled the power of the radical left. Gitlow's inconsequential pamphlet was easy pickin's for the ruling class in a way that Schenck's and Abram's more influential pieces were not. It is also worth noting that the Court actually offered an expansive interpretation of the First Amendment in this case, ruling that it did apply to states and not just to laws passed by Congress. Didn't help Gitlow any, though.