United States v. American Library Association, Inc., 539 U.S. 194, 11 (2003)

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204

UNITED STATES v. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSN., INC.

Opinion of Rehnquist, C. J.

serves." 201 F. Supp. 2d, at 420 (internal quotation marks omitted). To fulfill their traditional missions, public libraries must have broad discretion to decide what material to provide to their patrons. Although they seek to provide a wide array of information, their goal has never been to provide "universal coverage." Id., at 421. Instead, public libraries seek to provide materials "that would be of the greatest direct benefit or interest to the community." Ibid. To this end, libraries collect only those materials deemed to have "requisite and appropriate quality." Ibid. See W. Katz, Collection Development: The Selection of Materials for Libraries 6 (1980) ("The librarian's responsibility . . . is to separate out the gold from the garbage, not to preserve everything"); F. Drury, Book Selection xi (1930) ("[I]t is the aim of the selector to give the public, not everything it wants, but the best that it will read or use to advantage"); App. 636 (Rebuttal Expert Report of Donald G. Davis, Jr.) ("A hypothetical collection of everything that has been produced is not only of dubious value, but actually detrimental to users trying to find what they want to find and really need").

We have held in two analogous contexts that the government has broad discretion to make content-based judgments in deciding what private speech to make available to the public. In Arkansas Ed. Television Comm'n v. Forbes, 523 U. S. 666, 672-673 (1998), we held that public forum principles do not generally apply to a public television station's editorial judgments regarding the private speech it presents to its viewers. "[B]road rights of access for outside speakers 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." Id., at 673. Recognizing a broad right of public access "would [also] risk implicating the courts in judgments that should be left to the exercise of journalistic discretion." Id., at 674.

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