Cite as: 521 U. S. 457 (1997)
Souter, J., dissenting
efforts to address such problems would require little to satisfy the first Central Hudson criterion that a substantial government interest be the object of the regulation. Thus, if the Government were to attack these problems across an interstate market for a given agricultural commodity or group of them, the substantiality of the national interest would not be open to apparent question, and the sole issues under Central Hudson would seem to be whether the means chosen were sufficiently direct and well tailored. But when the government's program targets expression in only a narrow band of a broad spectrum of similar market activities in which its interests appear to be at stake, a question naturally does arise. For the arbitrariness or underinclusiveness of the scheme chosen by the government may well suggest that the asserted interests either are not pressing or are not the real objects animating the restriction on speech. See Rubin v. Coors Brewing Co., 514 U. S., at 489 ("[E]xemptions and inconsistencies" in alcohol labeling ban "bring into question the purpose of the . . . ban," such that it does not survive the Central Hudson test); City of Ladue v. Gilleo, 512 U. S. 43, 52-53 (1994) ("Exemptions from an otherwise legitimate regulation of a medium of speech . . . may diminish the credibility of the government's rationale for restricting speech in the first place"); Cincinnati v. Discovery Network, Inc., 507 U. S. 410, 424-426 (1993) (same); Florida Star v. B. J. F., 491 U. S. 524, 540 (1989) ("[T]he facial underinclusiveness" of a regulation of speech "raises serious doubts about whether Florida is, in fact, serving, with this statute, the significant interests" invoked in support of it). Under such circumstances, the government's obligation to establish the empirical reality of the problems it purports to be addressing, see Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 512 U. S. 622, 664 (1994); Edenfield v. Fane, supra, at 770-771, requires a sensible reason for drawing the line between those instances in which the government burdens First Amendment freedom in the name of the asserted interest and those in which it does not.
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