‘Where the press is free … all is safe’

To call the relationship between presidents and the press prickly would vastly undersell it.
THOMAS JEFFERSON: “I deplore ... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them.”
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: “The American people are beginning to realize that the things they have read and heard ... have been pure bunk — b-u-n-k — bunk.”
JOHN F. KENNEDY: “I’m convinced,” he said of The New York Times, “that they keep in stock a canned editorial on our ‘lack of leadership’ and run it every few weeks with little change.”
Watching recent presidents single out reporters for criticism is nothing new. FDR was not above calling out reporters publicly if he thought they had printed what he characterized as “lies,” “plain lies” and “deliberate lies.”
All of this has a familiar echo. Eighty years later, it might appear on the surface that little has changed between presidents and the media.
But something has changed, something worrisome, and this week — National Newspaper Week — is perhaps a moment to take stock of that change.
Earlier presidents, despite their at times antagonistic relationship with the press, understood and respected its role, and believed in its mission.
JEFFERSON: “Were it left to me to decide if we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
ROOSEVELT: “Freedom of conscience, of education, of speech, of assembly are among the very fundamentals of democracy and all of them would be nullified should freedom of the press ever be successfully challenged.”
KENNEDY: “There is a terrific disadvantage in not having the abrasive quality of the press applied to you daily. Even though we never like it, and even though we wish they didn’t write it, and even though we disapprove, there isn’t any doubt that we could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press.”
What is worrisome is that too many modern politicians, although they share their predecessors’ hostility to the press, don’t respect the role of a free press in a free society.
That is betrayed when politicians and candidates refuse to engage with it.
Roosevelt held twice-weekly press conferences, nearly 1,000 of them during his presidency.
Perhaps the biggest change is how few politicians read newspapers. Roosevelt read four to five papers daily. Kennedy read seven papers a day.
We don’t expect the adversarial nature of the relationship to change or even believe it should. The press exists to inform the American people and that often means presenting facts and evidence that challenge the narrative of those in power, but we do worry that the foundational role of the press in this nation is no longer understood, and that too few believe in its mission today. The media at times have been their own worst enemy, but it was another president, James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights with its First Amendment, who understood that what he called “some degree of abuse” would always come with the power, “and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press.”
Yet, he said, “To the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.”
During National Newspaper Week, we remind readers of the vital role of a newspaper, and that a free press and a free nation are interdependent. Lose the former and you sacrifice the latter.
THOMAS JEFFERSON, AGAIN: “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”
This editorial appeared in the Oct. 10, 2024, issue of the Joplin Globe as part of the newspaper’s coverage of National Newspaper Week. It is reprinted here with permission with the belief that newspapers’ work as it pertains to the presidency and every elected office below it will only become more important in the coming weeks, months and years.