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Friday
When the founding fathers insisted on freedom of the press, could they have foreseen how billionaires would take over the news, bending it to their own purposes? Much of what has gone wrong with America in recent decades can be traced to Rupert Murdoch’s “fair and balanced” Fox News, which amplified a steady stream of rightwing lies, and to Elon Musk’s X, which opened its doors to hate speech and Russian trolls while helping reelect Donald Trump. Founding fathers such as Benjamin Franklin must be rolling in their graves.
I mention Franklin because today is his birthday (January 17, 1706) and because, as a printer, he was an outspoken advocate of a free press. He even wrote a poem, “On the Freedom of the Press,” arguing its necessity. It begins with the contention that virtue and freedom are the results of a press “free from force.”
On the Freedom of the Press
By Benjamin Franklin
While free from force the press remains,
Virtue and freedom cheer our plains,
And learning largesses bestows,
And keeps unlicens’d open house.
We to the Nation’s public mart
Our works of wit, and schemes of art,
And philosophic goods, this way,
Like water carriage, cheap convey.
This tree which knowledge so affords,
Inquisitors with flaming swords
From lay-approach with zeal defend,
Lest their own paradise should end.
The press from her fecundous womb
Brought forth the arts of Greece and Rome;
Her offspring, skill’d in logic war,
Truth’s banner waved in open air;
The monster superstition fled,
And hid in shades in gorgon head;
And awless pow’r, the long kept field,
By Reason quell’d, was forc’d to yield.
This nurse of arts, and freedom’s fence,
To chain, is treason against sense:
And liberty, thy thousand tongues
None silence who design no wrongs;
For those who use the gag’s restraint,
First rob, before they stop complaint.
To our jaded sensibilities, the idea that reason and logic could frighten “monster superstition” (let’s call it fabricated news) and “awless power” (power that doesn’t think it can be awed) seems quaint and naïve. But for an Enlightenment thinker like Franklin, it was an article of faith that to chain “this nurse of arts and freedom’s fence” would be to commit “treason against sense.” Would that we still had his faith that Truth’s banner will be waved in open air.
Whether it’s the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and L.A. Times pulling their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris or billionaire Musk driving from his platform people who don’t agree with him, we’re seeing plenty of efforts to apply “gag’s restraint.” These media owners are robbing and then stopping a free press.
