The NYT carried a Reuters story Wednesday on the the image problem of press freedom in the United States, where the First Amendment celebrated its 213th birthday.

An excerpt:

America's First Amendment turned 213 years old on Wednesday, but supporters of the bulwark of personal liberty and free press are hardly celebrating.

The free press -- a linchpin of America's proud democracy -- faces its toughest challenge in a generation thanks to legal assaults that have left one U.S. journalist in home detention and others facing prison. A flurry of well-publicized scandals at some of the country's top news organizations has sullied the media's image and only made matters worse.

With other nations expecting America to lead the world in press freedoms, the stakes could not be higher, said Committee to Protect Journalists Executive Director Ann Cooper.

``The very big concern for us is if journalists are imprisoned in these cases it sends a terrible message around the world,'' she said.

Imprisoning journalists is typically associated with tyrannies and dictatorships, making it ironic that U.S. judges in the past six months have threatened at least eight reporters with sanctions or jail time for not naming sources, said First Amendment Center Ombudsman Paul McMasters.

Other reading:

From the First Amendment Center website:

Testing freedom: A year in the life of the First Amendment