Cite as: 518 U. S. 727 (1996)
Opinion of Thomas, J.
§§ 10(a) and (c) are not, for that does not change the fundamental fact, which petitioners never address, that it is the operators' journalistic freedom that is infringed, whether the challenged restrictions be content neutral or content based.
Because the access provisions are part of a scheme that restricts the free speech rights of cable operators and expands the speaking opportunities of access programmers, who have no underlying constitutional right to speak through the cable medium, I do not believe that access programmers can challenge the scheme, or a particular part of it, as an abridgment of their "freedom of speech." Outside the public forum doctrine, discussed infra, at 826-831, Government intervention that grants access programmers an opportunity to speak that they would not otherwise enjoy— and which does not directly limit programmers' underlying speech rights—cannot be an abridgment of the same programmers' First Amendment rights, even if the new speaking opportunity is content based.
The permissive nature of §§ 10(a) and (c) is important in this regard. If Congress had forbidden cable operators to carry indecent programming on leased and public access channels, that law would have burdened the programmer's right, recognized in Turner, supra, at 645, to compete for space on an operator's system. The Court would undoubtedly strictly scrutinize such a law. See Sable, 492 U. S., at 126. But §§ 10(a) and (c) do not burden a programmer's right to seek access for its indecent programming on an operator's system. Rather, they merely restore part of the editorial discretion an operator would have absent Government regulation without burdening the programmer's underlying speech rights.7
7 The plurality, in asserting that § 10(c) "does not restore to cable operators editorial rights that they once had," ante, at 761, mistakes inability to exercise a right for absence of the right altogether. That cable operators "have not historically exercised editorial control" over public access
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