Chapter 2 contextualises the mēchanē within the broader picture of rich visual theologies that existed both on the tragic stage and within the context of the Great Dionysia. The mēchanē should be interpreted alongside actors playing gods, statues depicting gods, and altars denoting sacred places. The plurality of visual theologies in the theatre and in the festival context parallels broader cultural norms in ancient Greece. This is important, on the one hand, to understand how the machine existed within broader religious and cultural expectations. On the other hand, putting the mēchanē and mechanical epiphany among other, contemporary strategies also helps to demonstrate the deus ex machina’s unique material, theatrical and theological characteristics.

This chapter aims to articulate a positive-rights paradigm that marshals contemporary, historical, and international legal frameworks to argue that government should have an affirmative duty to guarantee meaningful access to news and information for everyone. Drawing from democratic, legal, and economic theories, the chapter builds on a long lineage of argumentation – from Alexander Meiklejohn and Jerome Barron to more recent arguments advanced by C. Edwin Baker and Martha Minow – for why the First Amendment does not forbid government interventions that promote journalism. If we assume that press freedom is rendered meaningless without a press to protect, we arguably should go even further to compel the government to make targeted and democratically determined interventions into the media marketplace to guarantee public alternatives when private commercial media institutions fail to serve democratic needs.

The Supreme Court has consistently declined to interpret the First Amendment to extend exclusive protections for the press. Across areas like newsgathering, rights of access, and protection of confidential sources, the Court has repeatedly rejected the press’s claims to particularized constitutional treatment. Yet many states have pursued a different approach. Each state constitution contains independent press and speech provisions. These provisions diverge from the First Amendment – in their texts, drafting histories, and interpretive precedents – in ways that can be rights-expanding for the press.

This chapter argues that these state constitutional provisions have been underutilized by press advocates. These state constitutional press and speech protections, along with other related constitutional provisions, hold promise as a powerful source of independent protection for journalists. They can be used to fill gaps left by the Supreme Court’s often flimsy and scattershot First Amendment approach. They can be more easily amended to respond to new and growing threats to the press. And they can operate as a safety net to catch the press if the Roberts Court decides to withdraw critical First Amendment press protections. Moreover, the lessons of the state constitutional experience can be used to support expanded federal press protections under the First Amendment.

There is a conflict in law and in journalism ethics regarding the appropriateness of truthful but scandalous information: What should be published and what should be edited out? In the past, judges routinely gave the press the right to make such determinations and often sided with journalists even in surprising situations in which the privacy of the individual seemed clear. In modern internet times, however, some courts are more willing to side with the privacy of individuals over First Amendment press freedoms – and the case brought by professional wrestler Hulk Hogan against the Gawker website for publishing his sex tape without permission is one example. This chapter uses that scenario to explore the clash between an individual’s privacy rights and the rights of the press to decide what is news.

The news industry today is no longer economically powerful: Newspapers are in peril, television and cable viewership are in decline, news deserts dot the landscape, and jaw-dropping numbers of journalistic staff cuts have drained expertise from newsrooms. Social media have cannibalized content and replaced scarcity of frequencies with scarcity of attention, and the news industry has far less political power.

Under these circumstances, the fate of the press’s functions is an existential question both for the news media as we know it and for contemporary American democracy. Managing the complexity of this kind of information environment calls for independent and principled engagement with issues of public concern by those who hew to journalistic values, such as truth, verification, completeness, investigation, and context. It also calls for appropriate legal protections.

In this chapter, I seek to explore the evolving mosaic of threats facing the American press and consider what, if any, legal “rights” wielders of the press function need in response. I begin by identifying a set of key threats facing the press – from economic, legal, technological, and audience-based developments. I then propose some initial responses to these threats along five dimensions: funding conditions, a mixed legal strategy, AI policy, industry restructuring, and trust enhancement. I also call for a commitment to press self-examination from the vantage point of fundamental journalistic values in a democracy.

This chapter offers in-depth case studies to display how playwrights both used and innovated with mechanical epiphany. Six ancient tragedies are discussed, grouped in thematic pairs. Euripides’ Helen and Bacchae, are taken together as plays that use the deus ex machina to comment on divine form. While the mēchanē in the Helen confirms divine form in a play otherwise full of illusion; the mēchanē in the Bacchae is presented as yet another epiphanic mode of the mimetically inclined patron god of theatre, Dionysus. Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Euripides’ Heracles use the mēchanē to explore issues of space, movement, and the connectedness of divine and mortal. Finally, Euripides’ Orestes and Medea both make use of the mēchanē to question divine epiphany by bringing to the fore issues of ontological boundaries between human and divine.

If the press can claim rights different from those guaranteed to every speaker, it must be because we understand the Press Clause to serve constitutional values different from the freedom of speech clause and because these values require distinct forms of rights for their protection. In this short chapter, I explore four distinct constitutional values that at various times have been claimed to be uniquely served by the press: 1) the value of public discourse, 2) the Meiklejohnian value of distributing information, 3) the checking value, and 4) the value of the public sphere. Each of these values yields a different constitutional definition of the “press,” and each might imply a different array of rights that ought to accrue to the press. Although these values are distinct, the press may simultaneously serve one or more of them.