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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
I agree with you, and that's one of the things that I admire about Scalia - his consistency across the issue to decend into activism. I may not alway agree with it, but I certainly admire it. I also agree that the "difficult to amend" sentiment, but interpretation is completely different. They intended it to be interpreted it the way they wrote it - unfortunately, we can't apply late 18th Century printing technology to the internet, so we're stuck having to rely on the courts deciding if bloggers deserve the same 1st Amendment rights as traditional journalists.
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There are two different things in play here. The expansion of the freedom of the press is easy to see - I'm sure the founding fathers would have reasonably construed handbills printed by press or printed by hand to be substantially similar in that they represent speech deserving protection. From that standpoint, bloggers, radio, tv, etc are all good to go in my mind.
Freedom of speech is the one that has grown substantially. At this point, virtually an act that is expressive in any way is construed as speech - hence flag burning, artistic performances that have no words, and campaign contributions are protected speech. As a guy in the arts world, I'm glad to see abstract presentations protected as "speech". As a guy on the street, calling things like campaign contributions "speech" tends to give me that creepy crawly feeling. But that's my opinion, and I'm not convinced that my opinion is substantial enough to restrict the definition of speech.
dksuddeth: I suspect he may be speaking from the use of the word "press". I'm certainly not cutting that off, but if that's where The_Jazz was going, that alley leads to the literalism debate that I don't think is representative of Scalia's (or most other originalist's) views. Of course, I could be wrong.