Ben Shahn Mural, 'The First Amendment" at Woodhaven Post Office, Woodhaven, New York
No finger pointing, but the current insanity behooves me to write a few words here about the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate.
Some of the Administration's statements about the press remind me of an incident that occurred more than thirty years ago in Jakarta, Indonesia. Charles Wick, the then director of the U.S. Information Agency (for which I worked during almost all of my career in the foreign service), was visiting Indonesia and paid a courtesy call on the Indonesian Minister of Information, who asked Mr. Wick for advice and help to train local journalists to report the news in a “responsible” manner. (I use the quotes because this was code for "in a manner that hewed to the government version of the facts".) Mr. Wick responded in words somewhat like these, “Well, Mr. Minister, I regret to tell you that I cannot help you teach the press to be responsible because in the United States we believe it is more important that journalists be free to report and write their stories than it is for them to be responsible. That doesn't always make government officials comfortable or happy, but we see it as one of the foundations of our freedom.”
That's perhaps not as authoritative a source as Thomas Jefferson, whom President Trump cited in a Tweet about the press, but it is the reality of the American system that we value freedom of expression over the comfort of those who follow or are followed in the news media. That freedom extends to alt.right media as well as to the establishment or mainstream news organizations, with one exception for all, hate speech. Of course, news items should and can be checked whenever one suspects a story is less than accurate, but discomfort at the content of a news story, whether accurate or not, is no grounds for banning reporters from events or calling the press “the enemy of the people.”
In fact, a better known quote about the press from Thomas Jefferson is this one: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” A free press may sometimes disseminate inaccuracies or even falsehoods, but a free and irresponsible press is not the enemy of the people though it may cause presidents and other elected or appointed officials some frustration. Suppression of journalism is the enemy of democracy. Here's a concluding quote from Jefferson:
“Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
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