A passage from the piece worth worth highlighting:
Before the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court didn’t find that the First Amendment gave the press extraordinary protection to publish private material about public figures, or secret government documents. As the press moved from its raffish Front Page period into at least trying to behave like a profession, the Court gave it steadily more protection. But today the American press has a profoundly different structure than it did in the Sullivan era. Established, professionalized news organizations make up a far smaller portion of the whole, and most are under economic stress. The roguish part of the press is proliferating. People like Nick Denton love to mock the mainstream media for being preachy and self-regarding, while taking full advantage of the protections that arrived during its brief period of general public esteem. Now the public likes the press less and less, and that invites a sustained reconsideration of the protections.
Read the whole thing.