Speaker: Katerina Eva Matsa, Director of News and Information Research, Pew Research Center

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Time codes refer to the session video.

[00:05] Katerina Eva Matsa

Good morning. I'm Katerina Eva Matsa. I'm the director of news and information research at the Pew Research Center, and I'm here to talk to you about a very important issue. This year marks 250 years since this country's founding. That felt like a natural moment for us at Pew Research Center and the Pew-Knight Initiative to ask about a very old concept in a very current moment: What do Americans actually think press freedom means today? Not what the Constitution says, but what Americans across the political spectrum actually believe. We surveyed about 3,500 Americans this year, and we held around ten focus groups, where people basically talked it through out loud. And what we found surprised us. Not because Americans don't value press freedom—they do, overwhelmingly. What surprised us is that it was a more nuanced story than a simple story of support and opposition.

Let's start with what almost everyone agrees on. 73% of U.S. adults say press freedom is extremely or very important to the well-being of society. That is not a partisan number. Large majorities of both Democrats and Republicans say this. If you stopped the survey there, you'd write a very short, maybe boring report: Americans like press freedom. The end. But we asked many other questions, which paint a much more complete picture of how Americans think about this topic. Here's a tension. We asked people to choose between two principles they can't fully have at the same time.

[02:06] Is it more important for the press to be free to report the news, even if some of what gets published turns out to be inaccurate? Or is it more important to prevent inaccurate reporting, even if that means limiting press freedom? Americans are almost evenly split, with a slight edge, 53 to 45, toward prioritizing accuracy over freedom. That's the headline in one sentence: Americans support press freedom in principle, but their support is not absolute. It's conditional.

We also gave people specific scenarios and asked: Should the government be able to force a news organization to take a story down? The answer depends enormously on why. About six in ten Americans say yes if the story poses a real risk to national security. About half say yes if the story contains false information. But when the justification shifts to something political—the story is critical of the government, or it favors one side—support drops to somewhere between 10 and 14%. I want to note something here: legally, the First Amendment doesn't actually carve out most of these exceptions. This is about what people think is okay, not what's currently permitted. I just want to put that out there. So, in other words, Americans aren't just picking a side in an abstract press freedom debate.

[03:39] They're drawing a remarkably consistent line between restrictions that respond to a concrete harm and restrictions that look politically motivated.

I want to bring you into one of our focus groups for a second, because the survey numbers only tell you part of the story. The focus groups show you the argument people are having in their own heads to get there. We gave participants a scenario—a story that the government says is a threat to national security—and asked if the government should be able to block it. One man in his 30s said, and I quote: "We don't know whose lives could be in danger for this. I think there's a reason why it's classified. It shouldn't be distributed." And a woman in her 40s in the same group pushed back, not by disagreeing with him, but by asking a harder question. And I quote: "Can we trust completely that it does have to do with national security concerns? Or is this person a whistleblower, and it's something we really should know, but they're putting it under the blanket of 'this is a security concern'?" That exchange, in miniature, is the entire report. Americans aren't naive about this. They know the label "national security" can be genuine or it can be a pretext. That's the negotiation that is happening underneath the numbers.

[05:12] Now, you can't talk about press freedom in 2026 without talking about the current moment. 71% of Americans, including large majorities of both parties, say the relationship between the Trump administration and the news media is somewhat or very bad. On that much, there is real agreement. Now ask people whether the press has actually become less free, and the country splits hard along party lines. 72% of Democrats say yes. Just 15% of Republicans agree. Here's the thing I want you to sit with, though. It is not simply that one side is worried and the other isn't. Democrats and Republicans are, in a real sense, worried about two different things. Democrats are more likely to point to government actions against journalists—evidence, to them, that the press is losing freedom. Republicans are more likely to point to media bias, inaccurate reporting, and unchecked institutional power—evidence, to them, that the press isn't using its freedom responsibly. Same concepts: press freedom, freedom of speech. Two very different concerns underneath.

One more layer. Stay with me. We didn't just ask people what they believe. We tested what they actually know. And there's a real gap between valuing press freedom and understanding how it legally works. About half of adults correctly identified freedom of the press as a right guaranteed under the First Amendment.

[07:11] Fewer understood where those protections stop—for instance, that the First Amendment doesn't protect the press from being restricted by private companies, only by the government. So part of what's happening here is not just disagreement. It's that people are reasoning about press freedom with different levels of information about what press freedom legally is.

When a reporter recently asked me what struck me about the data, I said: people are not all or nothing. When you give them options and scenarios, they weigh harm against principle, context against abstraction, trust against suspicion. That's not necessarily indecision. That's Americans doing exactly what a healthy democratic public is supposed to do with a hard question. They take it seriously, and they think it through.

250 years in, the First Amendment is hugely relevant to American lives. But the debate continues about where freedom ends and where responsibility begins. Our data suggests Americans haven't resolved that argument, and maybe they're not supposed to. What they have done is show us, with real precision, where they personally draw the line. The full report, along with a short quiz that lets you test your own First Amendment knowledge, is available on our website. I encourage every one of you to take it before you leave this building. Thank you so much.