Press Clips - NYTimes.com Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. offered a provocative defense the other day of the Citizens United decision and its robust view of the First Amendment's application to corporate speech. The 2010 decision, which invalidated federal restrictions on corporate campaign spending, has been criticized by, among others, many news organizations, including this one. But the press, above all, should have received Citizens United gratefully, Justice Alito suggested, because after all, newspapers are published by corporations. So without protection for corporate speech, consider how the press would have fared, he continued, in such landmark cases as New York Times v. Sullivan, which provided a strong defense against libel suits by public figures, or the Pentagon Papers case, which upheld the right to publish government secrets. It was an anachronistic, even silly debater's point. New York Times v. Sullivan, decided in 1964, and the 1971 Pentagon Papers decision (New York Times v. United States) of course predated the Supreme Court's current infatuation with corporate speech and had nothing to do with the fact that newspaper publishing companies are corporations. It was the media's role in American society, not organizational format of the publisher's executive suite, that the justices found worthy of constitutional protection in these and other First Amendment decisions. Justice Alito, addressing a Federalist Society banquet in Washington, went on to question why "certain preferred corporations, namely those media organizations" should be accorded a favored position in the First Amendment pantheon. This may have been red meat for his conservative audience, but whatever Justice Alito's intent, it was far from a silly point. It was a serious one, and behind it, as he went on to suggest, lies a profound question: what, today, is "the press" anyway? It's a question without a simple answer, either in today's chaotic and rapidly changing media landscape or in Supreme Court doctrine. The First Amendment prohibits Congress (and, by later interpretive expansion, the states) from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Do the dual references to speech and press amount to one and the same, or does the amendment place "the press" in a special position, with rights not accorded to other speakers? The Supreme Court has never fully resolved this question. As Lee C. Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar who is president of Columbia University, notes in his recent book, "Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century," whether the press is just another speaker or a constitutionally favored one "has been a matter of active debate" on the court. Justice Potter Stewart wrote in 1975 that the Constitution's framers must have meant to protect the press as an institution, because "if the Free Press guarantee meant no more than freedom of expression, it would be a constitutional redundancy." But those words appeared in a law review article, not a Supreme Court opinion, and the court has generally not followed the path that Justice Stewart marked out. Potter Stewart retired from the court in 1981, a generation ago, before blogs and links and Web sites, when news was printed on paper and it was much easier to have a discussion about "the press." A fascinating example of just how tricky the definitional question has become is playing out these days in the Supreme Court pressroom. Since its founding 10 years ago, the Web site Scotusblog (Scotus being the standard abbreviation for "Supreme Court of the United States") has become the go-to place for people interested in following the court regularly and in close to real time. And there are a lot of such people out there. On June 28, the day the court handed down its decision in the Affordable Care Act case, the site received 5.3 million page views from one million unique users. Furthermore, unlike some more traditional media outlets, Scotusblog was error-free in promptly parsing and conveying the details of the complex decision. Its publisher, Tom Goldstein, later described the effort the site expended in covering that memorable day, in a riveting 7,000-word account that deserves a place in the how-to-do-journalism canon. Scotusblog covers the little decisions as well as the big ones. Its reporter, Lyle Denniston, draws on his 54 years of experience in covering the court (yes, 54, that's not a typographical error) to offer astute analysis of pending cases, arguments and decisions. Other staff members sift through the more than 100 new cases that reach the court each week in order to highlight the "petitions to watch" at the justices' weekly conference. The court's agenda-setting function is one of its most important and least transparent, yet the Supreme Court's own Web site doesn't post petitions. Scotusblog does, selectively, providing an invaluable service to anyone following the court from outside the building - as well as to many Supreme Court reporters whom the Scotusblog list saves from having to plow through the weekly pile of petitions on their own. Two years ago, Scotusblog won the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award for media that contribute to increased public understanding of law. Twenty-seven news organizations have permanent credentials to cover the Supreme Court. Remarkably, Scotusblog is not one of them. How can this be? We're back to the definitional problem. The court's public information office gives a permanent press pass only to reporters who already have credentials from the Senate Press Gallery or the White House (and the White House, in turn, makes Senate press credentials a prerequisite for a White House press pass). Over the years, Scotusblog has inquired about getting Congressional credentials but has been told not to bother even submitting a formal application. Tom Goldstein and his wife, Amy Howe, started Scotusblog as a way of attracting clients to their law practice, and the link between the blog and the law firm was disqualifying under the Senate Press Gallery's rules. The blog's reporter at the court, Mr. Denniston, happens to have a Congressional credential through WBUR, the Boston NPR station, which grants him eligibility for a Supreme Court permanent press pass and the access and work space in the court's press room that come with it. Some 1,000 reporters from around the country each year receive daily passes to cover individual cases, but these "day passes" come without guaranteed access to work space or an unobstructed view of the bench from the tight press quarters along the side of the courtroom. Even these temporary passes require a credential from somewhere, or some other proof of a bona fide press affiliation. For people without a pass, the press room itself is off limits. My friend Lyle Denniston is 81 years old. Without his WBUR affiliation, he would be out of luck, and it's unclear whether, if he ever retires, Scotusblog would be able to arrange any kind of press room access. Change may just possibly be in the wind, however. Last year, Scotusblog came under the wing of Bloomberg, a properly credentialed if nontraditional news organization that is now the site's official sponsor. I talked this week to Joe Keenan, who runs the Senate Press Gallery, to ask him whether the reconfigured Scotusblog might qualify. Quite possibly, he answered. "We'd look at them all over again," he said, noting that the gallery has changed substantially since my own brief stint covering Congress in the mid-1980's. "We have all kinds of different permutations now," Mr. Keenan said, adding that the 24-hour news cycle has brought more journalists to Congress than ever before. The daily press gallery now accredits 1,800 reporters representing some 400 organizations, including a number of online-only publications. "Nothing is too small to cover these days," Mr Keenan mused. "We had a bird fly in the window the other day," he replied, nearly choking with laughter, "and sure enough, someone wrote a story about it."