Freedom of the press (n.) in the Nicaragua of the 1980s outran anything America has ever tolerated: a big opposition paper, funded by the attacking power, calling for the government's overthrow.
Freedom of the press (n.) is, in American usage, so fused with private ownership that a call to let citizens take part in the media sounds like an attack on it.
Freedom of the press (n.) raises no concern in a country whose press belongs entirely to the far right.
Freedom of the press (n.) can coexist with near-total conformity: eighty-five opinion columns split on aid to the rebels, and all eighty-five condemn the government they fight.
Freedom of the press (n.) is tested less by any one columnist's honesty than by the range of views permitted: does the boundary of dissent sit where the state would put it?
Freedom of the press (n.) has so few true believers among articulate intellectuals that they could fit in a living room — most cry out only when the enemy is the censor.
Freedom of the press (n.) means little if it serves only powerful institutions.
Freedom of the press (n.) costs a state little in wartime when the press can be trusted to report from the standpoint of the approved side and keep within the bounds of state propaganda.
Freedom of the press (n.) faces its hardest test in a paper that openly sides with a foreign power's proxy army — a test no Western democracy has ever had to pass.
Freedom of the press (n.) meant, in its classic legal form, only that you could publish first and be punished afterward.
Freedom of the press (n.) is real for those who have internalized the required values: they can say, accurately, that they feel no pressure to conform.