First Principles & Last Things: Free Press, Free Country

0:00Welcome to First Principles and Last Things on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM, where we follow the news below the headline and consider it. Constitutionally, I'm your host Andrew Scofield and Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had to choose between a government with no newspapers or a newspapers with no government, he'd pick the newspapers without hesitation. And this introduces a very important question, which is, what is the role of the press in a free society? And more importantly, for me, what is the role of a journalist who exercises that freedom? In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Jefferson wrote that the whole basis of our government is the opinion of the people. And at protecting the public's ability to form that opinion is the very first object of government. Jefferson wasn't defending the press simply because newspapers were important. He was defending the public's ability to know what this government was doing and to form its own judgements. And Jefferson wasn't alone in this.

1:00Madison later wrote that a popular government without popular information is the prologue to a force or a tragedy, or possibly both. Self-government only works if citizens actually have the information necessary to govern themselves. In 1971, Justice Black wrote that the free press exists to serve the government, not the governors, a press capable of exposing government deception rather than simply amplifying it. And in the 1945 case, associated press of the United States, the court said that the first amendment assumes the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources, not one trusted narrator, but many competing ones. These cases put forth the same theory, a free society cannot depend on the government to control the information its citizens receive. The public needs information, and it needs more than one source of it. That constitutional theory assumes that the press is actually doing the job, it's freedom protects, giving citizens accurate information so that they can form their own opinions.

2:04So what does that mean for the journalist? Put simply, the journalist's job is to inform the public about what's happening, as accurately and as compellingly as possible. Journalists have enormous influence. They decide what stories to pursue. They decide what facts to emphasize. They decide what context to include. They decide what gets put in front of an audience to begin with. That influence is unavoidable. The question is what to do with it. If journalism is a service to the public, then that influence has to be exercised in service of the public's ability to understand reality, not simply in service of whatever conclusion the journalist wants the audience to reach. That's why there is an important distinction between informing people and persuading them. A journalist should gather the facts, establish what is known and what isn't, provide the necessary context and put that information in front of the public so citizens can reason their own way toward a conclusion. And that doesn't mean that journalists can never analyze events, explain the significance or have opinions of their own.

3:05It means we should be honest about which one we're doing. When reporting quietly becomes curation, the legal protection doesn't disappear, but the bargain that protection was built on stops functioning. An informed public can't correct a government's mistakes if it's only being handed one side of the version's events. Reporting tells people what happened. Analysis helps them understand what it means, advocacy tells them what they ought to believe. All three can have a place in public life, but the danger comes when one is presented as another. When a conclusion is presented as though it were fact. A free press doesn't require one perfect narrator. It requires a public free-to-hear competing accounts, examine the evidence and make its own judgments. The journalist responsibility that is not to eliminate his influence, because let's face it, that's impossible. It's to exercise that influence with honesty and responsibility. Jefferson bets on an informed public capable of correcting its own government's mistakes, and newspapers were one of the ways that information was supposed to travel.

4:07That's what the free press is ultimately for. Not to govern the people, not to manufacture opinions, and not to pretend that journalists have no influence over them. It is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves. And that means that the journalist has an obligation to pursue truth, report accurately, provide the context necessary to understand it, and communicate it clearly. A free press protects self-government, but only when the people remain free to make the judgments for themselves. Thank you for listening to First Principles Last Things. I'm Andrew Schofield. If you want to follow the news below the headlines, be sure to follow along on Spotify or Apple Podcasts as well as First Principles Last Things.substarch.com, where I periodically publish articles pertaining to the subject's discuss. I hope to see you next time when we dive into the next news story.