would be antithetical, as a general rule, to the discretion that stations and their editorial staff must exercise to fulfill their journalistic purpose and statutory obligations."); Finley, 524 U.S. at 586 ("The NEA’s mandate is to make esthetic judgments, and the inherently content-based ‘excellence’ threshold for NEA support sets it apart from the subsidy at issue in Rosenberger – which was available to all student organizations that were ’related to the educational purpose of the University . . . .’”) (quoting Rosenberger, 515 U.S. at 824); see also Cornelius v.  NAACP Legal Def. & Educ.  Fund, 473 U.S. 788, 804 (1985) ("The Government’s consistent policy has been to limit participation in the [Combined Federal Campaign] to ‘appropriate’ voluntary agencies and to require agencies seeking admission to obtain permission from federal and local Campaign officials. . . . [T]here is no evidence suggesting that the granting of the requisite permission is merely ministerial.").  The essence of editorial discretion requires the exercise of professional judgment in examining the content that the government singles out as speech of particular value.

This exercise of editorial discretion is evident in a library’s decision to acquire certain books for its collection.  As the government’s experts in library science testified, in selecting a book for a library’s collection, librarians evaluate the book’s quality by reference to a variety of criteria such as its accuracy, the title’s niche in relation to the rest of the collection, the authority of the author, the publisher, the work’s presentation, and how it compares with other material available in the same genre or on the same subject.  Thus, the content of every book that a library acquires has been reviewed by the library’s collection development staff or someone to whom they have delegated the task, and has been judged to meet the criteria that form the basis for the library’s collection development policy.  Although some public libraries use “approval plans” to delegate the collection development to third-party vendors which provide the library with recommended materials that the library is then free to retain or return to the vendor, the same principle nonetheless attains.

In contrast, in providing patrons with even filtered Internet access, a public library invites patrons to access speech whose content has never been reviewed and recommended as particularly valuable by either a librarian or a third party to whom the library has delegated collection development decisions.  Although several of the government’s librarian witnesses who testified at trial purport to apply the same standards that govern the library’s acquisition of print materials to the library’s provision of Internet access to patrons, when public libraries provide their patrons with Internet access, they intentionally open their doors to vast amounts of speech that clearly lacks sufficient quality to ever be considered for