MOKGORO J The constitutional guarantee of the freedom of speech is not so much for the benefit of the press as it is for the benefit of the public.46 [32] Although the United States Constitution makes no explicit reference to a right to receive information, that right is well established as one of the bedrock principles of First Amendment jurisprudence.47 Indeed, in some circumstances, the United States Court has, like the Indian Supreme Court in Bennett Coleman48, deemed the right of the recipient to obtain information to be more fundamental than that of the speaker to transmit it. In Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v FCC, a case involving the regulation of television and radio broadcast licenses, the Court held that “it is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.”49 [33] Perhaps the most striking illustration of this principle is to be found in the various cases decided by the United States Supreme Court in which it struck down government regulation of speech in instances where the speaker, for various reasons, could assert no first amendment rights at all, and the only first amendment right to be protected was that of the would-be recipient.50 46 Bennett Coleman & Co. v Union of India 1973 (2) S.C.R. 757, 818; see also Indian Express v Union of India 1985 (2) S.C.R. 287, 318-19. 47 Griswold v Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 482 (1965) (“the State may not, consistently with the spirit of the First Amendment, contract the spectrum of available knowledge. The right to freedom of speech and press includes not only the right to utter or to print, but the right to distribute, the right to receive, the right to read”); see also Bell v Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 572-73 (1979) (“That individuals have a fundamental First Amendment right to receive information and ideas is beyond dispute.”) (Marshall, J., dissenting). 48 1973 (2) S.C.R. 757. 49 395 U.S. 367, 390 (1969). 50 See, e.g., Procunier v Martinez, 416 U.S. 396, 408-09 (1974) (sustaining challenge to censorship of prisoners’ outgoing mail by focusing on first amendment rights of addressees to receive such mail); Kleindienst v Mandel, 408 U.S. 753, 762-65 (1972) (acknowledging in principle the right of an academic audience to hear presentation by communist alien seeking temporary visa to enter United States.); cf. Lamont v Postmaster General, 381 U.S. 301, 308 (1965) (striking statute permitting the government to intercept post coming into the United States from communist organisations abroad, because it interfered with addressees’ first amendment rights to receive such mail) (Brennan, J. concurring). 18