"But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it's a lie and they're protected if the person's famous or it's a company"
About this Quote
Wozniak’s line lands with the weary authority of a tech idealist who’s watched the information layer rot. The blunt opener, “But I know newspapers,” is doing status work: he’s not theorizing about media incentives, he’s claiming lived experience with how narratives get manufactured and sold. Coming from Apple’s co-founder, it reads less like partisan rage and more like a builder’s disappointment that the system meant to inform has optimized for conflict.
The rhetorical move is clever: he invokes the First Amendment not as a civic triumph but as a kind of liability shield. That inversion is the point. Free-press protections are framed as permission structure for strategic dishonesty, where the risk calculus changes if the target is “famous or it’s a company.” The subtext is about asymmetry: celebrities and corporations are public-facing, legally entangled, and often reluctant to litigate. They’re also clickable. So the alleged “lie” isn’t just moral failure; it’s a business model that assumes the subject can absorb reputational damage or be forced into reactive PR.
He’s also gesturing at a modern reality newspapers didn’t invent but now compete within: attention economics. In a feed-driven ecosystem, corrections don’t travel as far as accusations, and ambiguity is bad for engagement. Wozniak’s phrasing collapses legal nuance (libel standards, actual malice, retraction practices) into a single grievance, which is precisely why it resonates: it captures how it feels when institutions hide behind principles while behaving like platforms.
The intent isn’t to abolish the First Amendment; it’s to call out the gap between press freedom as civic duty and press freedom as market weapon.
The rhetorical move is clever: he invokes the First Amendment not as a civic triumph but as a kind of liability shield. That inversion is the point. Free-press protections are framed as permission structure for strategic dishonesty, where the risk calculus changes if the target is “famous or it’s a company.” The subtext is about asymmetry: celebrities and corporations are public-facing, legally entangled, and often reluctant to litigate. They’re also clickable. So the alleged “lie” isn’t just moral failure; it’s a business model that assumes the subject can absorb reputational damage or be forced into reactive PR.
He’s also gesturing at a modern reality newspapers didn’t invent but now compete within: attention economics. In a feed-driven ecosystem, corrections don’t travel as far as accusations, and ambiguity is bad for engagement. Wozniak’s phrasing collapses legal nuance (libel standards, actual malice, retraction practices) into a single grievance, which is precisely why it resonates: it captures how it feels when institutions hide behind principles while behaving like platforms.
The intent isn’t to abolish the First Amendment; it’s to call out the gap between press freedom as civic duty and press freedom as market weapon.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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