Free press

“ But there is another attempt to grasp and to wield a power over public opinion, of a still more daring character, and far more dangerous effects.
In all popular governments, a FREE PRESS is the most important of all agents and instruments. It not only expresses public opinion, but, to a very great degree, it contributes to form that opinion. It is an engine for good or for evil, as it may be directed; but an engine of which nothing can resist the force. The conductors of the press, in popular governments, occupy a place, in the social and political system, of the very highest consequence. ”

“ A free press is indispensable to the workings of our democratic society. The business of the press, and therefore the business of the Associated Press, is the promo ion of truth regarding public matters by furnishing the basis for an understanding of them. Truth and understanding are not wares like peanuts or potatoes. And so, the incidence of restraints upon the promotion of truth through denial of access to the basis for understanding calls into play considerations very different from comparable restraints in a cooperative enterprise having merely a commercial aspect. ”

“ This young lady, as will be seen from an extract of a letter to the author which we take the liberty to produce, is fully alive to the work of the press and the demand for active laborers. She writes: "Allow me to say, that I think my work as a writer but barely begun, for, God helping mo, I mean to become one of no mean caliber. I regard the press as one of the mightiest factors that more this universe of ours. So great is its influence, so powerful its results, I verily believe that if we, through any unseen force, should lose our free press, our republic would be shattered. ”

“ No arrogance on one side; on the other, no envy. It is only countries blessed with a free press that can be thus favoured. Even a free press is not alone sufficient. Besides a free press, you must have a servile public. ”

“ In a free press, we have a never-dying exponent of public opinion, a perpetual advocate of rational liberty, and a powerful engine for the exposure, which is ultimately the redress, of wrong: and although this influential member of our government receives no public money, nor is called right honourable, nor speaks in the House, yet in fact and in truth it has a seat in the Cabinet, and, upon momentous occasions, a voice of thunder. ”

“ But the only security of all, is in a free press. ”

“ The freedom of the press in itself presupposes an independent judiciary through which that freedom may, if necessary, be vindicated. And one of the potent means for assuring judges their independence is a free press.
A free press is vital to a democratic society because its freedom gives it power. Power in a democracy implies responsibility in its exercise. No institution in a democracy, either governmental or private, can have absolute power. ”

“ That Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society. ”

“ The finger of government leveled against the press is omnious. Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ”

“ Now, it is evident that, of all forms of civic activity, writing upon the Free Press most directly challenges this arbitrary power. There is not an editor responsible for the management of any Free Paper who will not tell you that a thousand times he has had to consider whether it were possible to tell a particular truth, however important that truth might be to the commonwealth. ”

“ A free press is indispensable to human progress. So long as I run the Courant it shall speak plainly of intolerance and hypocrisy of every form. I shall hit the corruption of the times in high places or low. ”

“ More than this: one gets to hear of significant manoeuvres, conducted secretly, of course, but showing vividly the weight and effect of the Free Press. One hears of orders given by a politician which prove his fear of the Free Press: of approaches made by this or that Capitalist to obtain control of a free journal: sometimes of a policy initiated, an official document drawn up, a memorandum filed, which proceeded directly from the advice, suggestion, or argument of a Free Paper which no one but its own readers is allowed to hear of, and of whose very existence the suburbs would be sceptical. ”

“ We wish to put the ideal rules into practice, to offer liberty instead of chains, and see whether liberty will not disclose its proper checks; believing that a free press will prove safer than the censorship ”

“ Now to every human evil of a political sort that has appeared in history (to every [Pg 44] evil, that is, affecting the State, and proceeding from the will of man—not from ungovernable natural forces outside man) there comes a term and a reaction.
Here I touch the core of my matter. Side by side with what I have called "the Official Press" in our top-heavy plutocracy there has arisen a certain force for which I have a difficulty in finding a name, but which I will call for lack of a better name "the Free Press." ”

“ It is here that the relations the negro Press sustains to the negro problem, are thrown out as clearly as the sun in the heavens, against the mountainous wall of observation. The newspaper has become, in every country where modern civilization exists, the oracle of the people. More than that, it has become the defender of the just rights of the people against the encroachments of the ambitious and the covetous few; so that it may of a truth be said that error and wrong can not long prevail where the Press is left free to combat them. ”

“ In an ideal world, the responsibility of the press would match the freedom and public trust given it. But from the earliest days of our history, this free society, dependent as it is for its survival upon a vigorous free press, has tolerated some abuse. ”

“ To produce that mood is the very object of the boycott to which the Free Press is subjected.
But I have lived, in the last five years, to see that this mood was false. It is now clear that steady work in the exposure of what is evil, whatever forces are brought to bear against that exposure, bears fruit. That is the reason I have written the few pages printed here: To convince men that even to-day one can do something in the way of political reform, and that even to-day there is room for something of free speech. ”

“ And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. ”

“ Public discussion, free elections, responsible ministers, the liberty of the press, I have no objection to all that, the liberty of the press especially; to stifle it is absurd. I am convinced on this point. I am the man of the people: if the people really wish for liberty let them have it. ”

“ In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. ”

“ I say that in the first place the Free Press, being a reformer, suffered from what all [Pg 61] reformers suffer from, to wit, that in their origins they must, by definition, go against the stream.
The official Capitalist Press round about them had already become a habit when the Free Papers appeared. Men had for some time made it a normal thing to read their daily paper; to believe what it told them to be facts, and even in a great measure to accept its opinion. ”

“ Chambers' Encyclopedia defines it as the absence of any authorized official restraint on publication.
In other words, there is no law defining the direction of the press, or any expression of its opinion, so long as it conforms to right. The Britannica Encyclopedia on the freedom of the press gives this definition: "The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the invaluable rights of every man; and every citizen may freely speak, write, and print on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty." ”

“ But the freedom of enterprise protected by the Sherman Law necessarily has different aspects in relation to the press than in the case of ordinary commercial pursuits. The interest of the public is to have the flow of news not trammeled by the combined self-interest of those who enjoy a unique constitutional position precisely because of the public dependence on a free press. A public interest so essential to the vitality of our democratic government may be defeated by private restraints no less than by public censorship. ”

“ We claim, with all the right thinking people, that the press, an expressor of the popular will, is an indispensable part of the nation's freedom. We claim that since it purports to work for a race's benefit; since it purports to express a race's thought upon all questions affecting their material, moral, religious, social and intellectual welfare, their civil and political rights, the race for which it labors is entitled to a free expression as to its success and achievements. ”

“ If our great newspapers, which are influential, which claim to be independent, and which ought to be free, are restrained from publishing articles advocating postal telegraphy, or criticising the management of a news corporation, what matters it that the 56freedom of the press is choked by a board of directors rather than a government censor? If the citizen dare not give voice to his views on public affairs, what matters it whether his utterances be choked by the knuckles of a king, or the polite menaces of an employer? ”

“ And those fathers of America thought also that they had but to leave the press free, and everyone would live in the light. They did not realize that a free press could develop a sort of constitutional venality due to its relations with advertisers, and that large newspaper proprietors could become buccaneers of opinion and insensate wreckers of good beginnings. ”

“ The first thing to note is that the Free Press is not read perfunctorily, but with close attention. The audience it has, if small, is an audience which never misses its pronouncements whether it agrees or disagrees with [Pg 81] them, and which is absorbed in its opinions, its statement of fact and its arguments. Look narrowly at History and you will find that all great reforms have started thus: not through a widespread control acting downwards, but through spontaneous energy, local and intensive, acting upwards. ”

“ But the only security of all, is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted, when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure. ”

“ They will triumph and go on in their destructive career; they will assume that an unlimited confidence has been placed in them, and there will be no bounds to their already frightful oppression. A verdict of not guilty will stagger and shake them from their holds, will destroy the remains of ignorance and superstition, and establish the liberty of the Press and free discussion with all its valued influence. Every stratagem will be used by my persecutors and by that portion of the Press which adheres to them to excite a feeling of prejudice against me. ”

“ Equally irrelevant is the objection that it turns the Associated Press into a 'public utility' to deny to a combination of newspapers the right to treat access to their pooled resources as though they were regulating membership in a social club. The relation of such restraints upon access to news and the relation of such access to the function of a free press in our democratic society must not be obscured by the specialized notions that have gathered around the legal concept of 'public utility'. ”

“ We will fill whole pages of the newspapers with advertisements drawn up by the 'livest publicity artists' of the day. We will enlist the sympathies and support of the press—for this is not an Oriental despotism, but a free country, where the power of the press is absolute. And if the sympathies of the press are cool, or their support hangs back, we will threaten them with the Press Bureau. We will tell the country-gentlemen, and the men-of-business, that it is their duty to put on the screw; and most of these, being easily hypnotised by the word 'duty,' will never dream of refusing. ”

“ But newspapers are already, in effect, edited at the central headquarters of banking and industry. And thus the boasted “free press” of America has become a simon-pure example of Big Business, absolute, brutal monopoly.
The Fascist “Fringe”
The increasingly monopolistic character of the press has made its control by Big Business an automatic process. But it has had still another result: to put the press under the influence of the most reactionary, least responsible wing of Big Business. The direct agency of this influence is the more openly pro-fascist section of the press. ”

“ What I do doubt in the approaching and already apparent success of the Free Press is its power to effect democratic reform.
It will succeed at last in getting the truth told pretty openly and pretty thoroughly. It will break down the barrier between the little governing clique in which the truth is cynically admitted and the bulk of educated men and women who cannot get the truth by word of mouth but depend upon the printed word. We shall, I believe, even within the lifetime of those who have taken part in the struggle ”