ON PRESS FREEDOM
To mark this Fourth of July, I want to draw our attention to a precious part of the experiment launched by the founders of America — a free press. They understood that without it, self-government would fail.
Compiled by Christopher B. Daly
[The following are excerpted from my new book. . .
THE JOURNALIST’S COMPANION
(forthcoming from Routledge, in a few months)]
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right… and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers. ” — John Adams (A dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765)
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” — John Adams (Argument in Defense of the British Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials. 1770)
“The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government with newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson (Letter to Col. Edw. Carrington, 1787)
“A journalist is a grumbler, a censurer, a giver of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” — Abraham Lincoln
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” — Attributed to George Orwell
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” — A.J. Liebling (The New Yorker. 5/14/1960)
“If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he’s lost the battle before he takes the field.” — Ralph Ellison
“A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society.” — Walter Lippman, 1965.
“Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘Fuck the government’.” — Lenny Bruce
“Effective self-government cannot succeed unless the people are immersed in a steady, robust, unimpeded, and uncensored flow of opinion and reporting which are continuously subjected to critique, rebuttal, and reexamination . . .
“The press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class, but to bring fulfillment to the public’s right to know.” — Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (in a dissent in the Branzburg case on journalists’ right to protect their sources, 1972)
“In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.” — Ellen Goodman
“If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” — Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr.
“Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and … it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” — Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. (Sullivan, 1964)
