660
Opinion of the Court
apolis Star, supra, at 585, 591-592; see also Grosjean, supra (invalidating Louisiana tax on publications with weekly circulations above 20,000, which fell on 13 of the approximately 135 newspapers distributed in the State). The sales tax at issue in Arkansas Writers' Project, which applied to general interest magazines but exempted religious, professional, trade, and sports magazines, along with all newspapers, suffered the second of these infirmities. In operation, the tax was levied upon a limited number of publishers and also discriminated on the basis of subject matter. Arkansas Writers' Project, supra, at 229-230. Relying in part on Minneapolis Star, we held that this selective taxation of the press warranted strict scrutiny. 481 U. S., at 231.
It would be error to conclude, however, that the First Amendment mandates strict scrutiny for any speech regulation that applies to one medium (or a subset thereof) but not others. In Leathers v. Medlock, 499 U. S. 439 (1991), for example, we upheld against First Amendment challenge the application of a general state tax to cable television services, even though the print media and scrambled satellite broadcast television services were exempted from taxation. As Leathers illustrates, the fact that a law singles out a certain medium, or even the press as a whole, "is insufficient by itself to raise First Amendment concerns." Id., at 452. Rather, laws of this nature are "constitutionally suspect only in certain circumstances." Id., at 444. The taxes invalidated in Minneapolis Star and Arkansas Writers' Project, for example, targeted a small number of speakers, and thus threatened to "distort the market for ideas." 499 U. S., at 448. Although there was no evidence that an illicit governmental motive was behind either of the taxes, both were structured in a manner that raised suspicions that their objective was, in fact, the suppression of certain ideas. See Arkansas Writers' Project, supra, at 228-229; Minneapolis Star, 460 U. S., at 585. But such heightened scrutiny is unwarranted when the differential treatment is "justified by some special
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