Jefferson: Declaration main author’s belief in free (and freewheeling) press
September 17 is Constitution Day, marking the moment in 1787 when delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the U.S. Constitution, which went on to be ratified by the states the following year.
But no one’s going to get that day off so they can head to the beach, light the grill and ignite fireworks.
So we’re seizing the occasion of July 4 — during this time of attacks on, and mistrust of, the media — by remembering the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.
He’s the quotable founder and friend of the press who said, “…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,” and, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
Jefferson lived in a time when newspapers were rare. Only a few dozen were being printed at the time of the Declaration’s signing. They proliferated in the years that followed, and Jefferson understood their importance to a free republic.
Jefferson continued to defend a free press even after he was attacked by Alexander Hamilton in a series of scathing, unsigned editorials published in the Gazette of the United States while Jefferson was running for president in 1796. In one editorial, Hamilton accused Jefferson of having an affair with a slave (fact check: true).
People who clutch their pearls today at what they see as a lack of objectivity in news coverage would do well to remember that the press made little pretense of objectivity during the founders’ time and throughout much of American history. It wasn’t until well into the 20th century that news organizations attempted to be more impartial in their coverage.
Even if mainstream news is returning to its partisan, biased roots — and we don’t believe it is, for the most part — it’s returning to a form closer to what the founders were reading in the late 18th century. Yet they still granted the press extraordinary freedom through the First Amendment.
Jefferson also demonstrated that it’s possible to believe in freedom of the press and to be disgusted with it at the same time.
“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” Jefferson himself wrote in 1807. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”
Before him, George Washington said he had no interest in seeking a third term partly because he felt “disinclined to be longer buffeted in the public prints by a set of infamous scribblers.”
Presidential criticism of the press has been pretty much nonstop since.
Richard Nixon sometimes left press criticism to his vice president and attack dog, Spiro Agnew, who in a fit of alliteration once called the press “nattering nabobs of negativism” (this before Agnew resigned in disgrace for accepting kickbacks).
In a 1993 Rolling Stone interview, Bill Clinton railed that he had “not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it…”
Donald Trump has separated himself from the crowd through the frequency of his threats and his sometimes ominous warnings, such as wanting to change libel laws (he can’t).
It would be refreshing if — channeling Jefferson — Trump leavened his criticism with an occasional nod to the value of a free press to our liberty.
Regardless, the press and the First Amendment will survive Trump.
Visionaries like Jefferson chiseled press freedom into the Constitution, and short of an amendment or a hostile Supreme Court, that freedom should remain safe from the whims of testy presidents.
That’s something to celebrate.