Benjamin Franklin at the printing press
From We’re History by Joesph M. Adelman:
Over the past several weeks, questions about the role of the press in politics and what exactly “freedom of the press” means have come to the forefront of public debate. Politicians have begun to attack press freedom as a shield for hostile reporters. For their part, journalists have been thinking out loud about the way they practice their craft, and worrying about the impact of the new presidential administration on it. In so doing, they are restoring the eighteenth-century formulation that emphasized freedom from government interference as the key element of press freedom.
From the founding of the republic, freedom of the press has been seen as a cherished part of a functioning democracy. But what freedom of the press means has neither been clear nor consistent over time. Since World War II, Americans have tended to view freedom of the press as a license for journalists to investigate any story in the public interest without threat of retaliation. Journalists suggested that they earned that expansive right by holding themselves to a standard of objectivity, through which they pursued stories with determination but without interjecting their opinions.
In debates since late last year, however, many journalists have returned to the arguments that newspaper editors and printers made in the eighteenth century, identifying press freedom not as active participation in politics, but simply as the right to reflect the words of others. Crucially, now, as then, that more passive construction of the role of the press provides plausible deniability from political retaliation, while still letting journalists shape the content of the news.
Read the rest of the article at We’re History
Categories: History of Culture
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