While freedom of the press in the US may be violated pragmatically, you'd have a much harder time challenging it philosophically. That is, police offers arresting individual reporters (especially ones involved in protest) slips by relatively easily, but a federal law placing limits on what information the press can publish would receive strong opposition.
Are you sure about that? If a government passes a law restricting speech because it has to, and then enforces it to restrict speech, it isn't clear to me that's worse than a government which doesn't bother with laws in the first place. Either way, you have no freedom of speech, but at least with the former you still have some semblance of rule of law. That's more important than speech, IMO (although of course without both you're already pretty fucked).