When we are talking about First Amendment rights, how does this distinction apply to newspapers, radio, television? Certainly you are not suggesting that for-profit media companies lose "freedom of the press" merely by being "for profit"??
I do understand the emotional and intuitive appeal of saying something like what follows, regarding "corporations" and their constitutional rights:
-- "media" companies have one set of rights.
-- churches, temples, mosques, synagogs, religious orders have another set of rights
-- universities, hospitals, museums, libraries, and foundations have another set of rights
-- political parties and political advocacy groups have another set of rights
-- non-media for-profit companies and labor unions have another set of rights
The problem with this line of thought becomes "who determines what those rights are?" It cannot be the government, otherwise we have just opened the door for government censorship. Merely by allowing "media companies" to be defined at all allows for a definition to restrict certain groups from that category, thereby restricting their free speech rights.
Well, then, you might reply: suppose I reluctantly am forced to concede that all corporations must have free speech rights (if not, then we have automatically restricted them, by definition) -- That doesn't necessarily mean that all corporations must necessarily have each and every one of the First Amendment rights. Well, the last sentence is your argument, not mine. How do you go about defining which corporations have which First Amendment rights, which corporations have some First Amendment rights but not other First Amendment rights, and how do you do so without granting the government the power to censor people in some form or fashion?
