Why stop at journalists?
Social media is filled with all sorts of informationally toxic material from people who either know nothing or are deliberately lying. Troll farms, political activists and conspiracy theoriests are far more a worry than journalists in terms of social media disinformation. For instance, it's not significantly journalists who convinced 70% of Republicans that Biden cheated his way to the presidency and inspired a few thousand to assault the Capitol.
The bottom line, however, is that the sort of people who bleat hardest about social media bans are the people most prone to or invested in spreading disinformation. Effectively, the demand is that they want to lie and bullshit and never be called out on it. They don't give a damn about free speech except from a completely self-serving notion that they should be able to say what they like without impediment, criticism or negative consequences.
The irony is that their non-stop parade of lies and bullshit is what has caused bans, because of a perception that misinformation has reached crisis levels. If people do not exercise their freedoms with responsibility, the inevitability is that society enacts self-protection and curtails those abused freedoms. And the irresponsible will then go blubbing on about the unfairness that they cannot abuse their freedoms anymore, like any child that has misbehaved and had their toys removed.
