The U.S. Used to Rank 20th for Press Freedom. Now We're 64th.

In 2010, the United States ranked 20th in the world on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. Pretty good. Today, we're 64th out of 180 — officially "problematic." That's a strange place to land for the country that put freedom of the press in the very first amendment to its Constitution.

So this episode traces exactly how we got from "this is one of the most important rights we can give people" to "problematic" — through jury nullification, a president who made it illegal to criticize him (but not his own VP), a Civil War's worth of newspaper editors arrested without trial, two world wars' worth of speech crackdowns, and a Supreme Court that's been arguing about all of this, more or less nonstop, for almost 300 years.

Along the way: Peter Zenger, the colonial printer whose 1730s trial planted the first seeds of American press freedom before the First Amendment even existed. John Adams' Sedition Act, which criminalized criticizing the president while conveniently leaving his own vice president fair game. Lincoln's Union government arresting Northern newspaper editors without due process. Woodrow Wilson's Espionage and Sedition Acts, which imprisoned thousands of anti-war activists and gave us Schenck v. United States and the original "clear and present danger" test — a standard the Supreme Court doesn't even use anymore. And a rapid-fire tour of the modern rulebook: what counts as libel, why media antitrust law exists, why the Pentagon Papers got published, whether the First Amendment applies to your Instagram comments (yes), and where the actual legal line sits today, care of a 1969 case involving a Klan rally that most people have never heard of.

Whatever happens to journalism next — and between political pressure, the changing internet, and AI, it's genuinely unclear — at least now you'll have the actual context for what the government can, and can't, do about what gets published.

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