Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we are launching the second episode in a three part series that is going to be talking about free speech. Last week, we talked about ways in which the government has clamped down on free speech and why that matters. Today, we’re going to be talking about the vital importance of a free press for democracy, and generally speaking for a healthy working Republic.

Now, it was not hard last week and it’s once again, not hard this week to talk about things that are happening around us that in one way or another, keep touching on this question of free speech. And in the case of this week, even on the question of why a free press is important, a striking one that happened just recently took place a couple of days ago at a venue in the Philadelphia suburb of Warminster. And it was a big pre-primary rally by the Republican party’s gubernatorial front runner state Senator Doug Mastriano and what was discovered and Will Bunch from the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a piece on it is that they were not letting the press in to that rally.

And not only that, but there was someone dressed as one of my guys, a sort of continental era, revolutionary guy in a three-cornered hat blocking the press from entering the rally which we’re going to come back to this in a moment, but I can name you a good number of founders that would not be happy with that particular guy in a tri corner hat blocking the press out of a rally. But regardless, we are at a moment where the free press for a while for several years has been under attack. But now in a sense that kind of attack is being more, maybe not quite institutionalized but adopted.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And at the same time in contrast to that on her last day at the White House, White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki said…

Jen Psaki (archival):

I want to thank all of you in this room. You have challenged me, you have pushed me, you have debated me, and at times we have disagreed. That is democracy in action. That is it working. Without accountability, without debate, government is not as strong. And you all play an incredibly pivotal role. Thank you for what you do. Thank you for making me better. Most importantly, thank you for the work every day you do to make this country stronger.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that contrasts pretty powerfully with what happened in front of Mastriano’s campaign rally.

Joanne Freeman:

Now it’s a vitally important topic because it’s easy to say in general terms here that a free press is vital to a functioning democratic form of government, but that has been a central fact underlying our form of government from the very beginning. From not only the constitution, but even before the US constitution in the revolutionary era, there was a general assumption that a free press was the ultimate way in which you could preserve the Liberty of a populace and protect them against, and this is what they were mostly focused on, protect them against a tyrannical or potentially tyrannical government.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So walk us through that Joanne. What does a free press actually mean to the founders? One of the things that interest me is why do they care so much about it? I’m going to assume here that they were accustomed to a system that did not let them criticize their government as freely as they felt it was appropriate to do. Is that right?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, in part that’s true. The other half of that equation though, is people at the time even noted that American colonists had constantly as many English subjects did, talked about how the British empires, the freest in the world and the British subjects are the freest in the world. And in some ways that idea that there were liberties involved in being a British subject that were vitally important and not true elsewhere was part of the identity of being a British subject.

But American colonists were certainly used to and in the revolutionary era were watching some of what they were saying, be ignored or be shut down. So it was a question for them not a free press in and of itself is the issue, but the link between the importance of a free press and its impact on government. And so in the minds of people at the time, a free press was the only weapon that people could have to attack an unjust government.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Because you would tell people that something untoward was happening and they would then what? Rise up.

Joanne Freeman:

I will offer you a quote. I’m sorry, Heather, this is not on purpose, but it’s very on point.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You’re going to quote James Madison again.

Joanne Freeman:

Thomas Jefferson. I’m so sorry.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I saw that coming. Don’t worry.

Joanne Freeman:

I know you did. I was warning you. I gave you an advanced warning. Jefferson actually said that a free press brings public officials before the tribunal of public opinion and thereby produces reform peaceably, which must otherwise be done by revolution. So he’s saying if I could have found another quote to say it more directly, Heather, I would not have subjected you to Jefferson.

But he’s saying it really directly there that a free press brings before the tribunal of public opinion, what government is doing, and then enables the people to rise up and ask for reform in a peaceable manner rather than through violence. And in the United States, particularly once the new government kicks into play, one of the things that distinguished a Republic from a monarchy was the idea that in a Republic it’s grounded on public opinion, the public rules.

So unlike a monarchy, that’s hierarchical and grounded on monarchy being passed from generation to generation, in a Republic, it’s the public partly through free and fair elections, partly through weighing in on other things that the government is doing, they have the power, but the only way they can know what the government is doing is through a free press.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So I like this. The idea that having a press be able to criticize the government, call attention to its shortcomings and expose it for what it’s really doing is central to preventing the idea of a revolution. It’s central to making adjustments course corrections, as one goes rather than suddenly discovering, my brother issues as the example of GPS. If you’re sailing across the Atlantic, you want to make short course corrections rather than discovering that you were headed for Dublin and instead you’re ending up in Ghana. You want to do it a little bit at a time.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. If you are informed about what’s going on around you in government, just as you’re suggesting here, you can respond electorally, you can respond structurally. You can use the system that’s been set in motion to respond and to act against things that you think are unfit or unfair. Whereas if what’s happening in government is hidden from you, when you discover this, that potentially it could be a revolution moment that you need to be continually informed.

Patrick Henry has another one of these quotes that just lays it on the line. He says the liberties of a people never were nor ever will be secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them. So given that the early American Republic, that at the time, they understood that what was striking and different about it was the power of the public and given that they were concerned because the new United States was spread out over such a great geographic distance, so they kind of wondered how it would be held together, and that that might allow things to be hidden for both of those reasons, a free press was almost seen as a fourth branch of government. It was a kind of structural balancing point that was vitally important for keeping the democratic component of the Republican operation, keeping the people informed and enabling them to act.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I know Benjamin Franklin was a printer. Were there other founders who also were involved in the press early on?

Joanne Freeman:

For sure. In the revolutionary era, there were people feeding all kinds of things to the press. When Europeans came to the United States, one of the things they often remarked upon was the degree to which Americans were focused on newspapers, reading newspapers, handing newspapers around, Americans were seen as a newspaper people. When the revolution is happening and the states have to create their first constitution basically after independence is declared, one after another these new state constitutions all include some kind of statement about a free press. Saying something like the press should never be restrained, it should be enviably preserved. It’s the bulwark of Liberty. Again and again and again, it’s seen as a kind of safety valve for the power of government.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So that’s a really great segue into the first thing we thought we would talk about. And that is when the free press ceases to be free.

Joanne Freeman:

So the story of Elijah Lovejoy is a dramatic one and an important one understood at the time to be important and after. So Elijah Lovejoy was born in Albian Maine in 1802 to a congregational preacher father within a farming family. And he went to Colby College and after that, he went west to St. Louis working at the St Louis times. Now in 1830, he returned east. He went to Princeton Theological seminary came back to St. Louis in 1833 and began a newspaper, The Observer, a Protestant newspaper with an abolitionist slant.

And the paper also railed against drinking and against Catholicism. Over the next few years, Lovejoy’s aversion to slavery grew, and he really began to use The Observer to really attack the institution of slavery. Now, Missourian’s at the time who had entered the union as a slave state in 1821 tended to see open discussion of abolition as seditious, certainly as dangerous.

And so in 1835, a group of citizens from St. Louis warned Lovejoy to stop criticizing slavery. And they sent a petition which argued “Freedom of speech and press does not imply a moral right to freely discuss the subject of slavery. A question two, nearly allied to the vital interests of the slave holding states to admit to public disputation.” Now, Lovejoy responded by arguing that this was a kind of slippery slope argument, that if you banned discussion of slavery, that would lead to broader bans and a really repressed press.

He wrote, ‘Today a public meeting declares, you shall not discuss slavery. Tomorrow, another meeting decides it is against the piece of society that the principle of popery, meaning Catholicism, be discussed. The next day, a decree is issued against speaking against distilleries, drama shops and drunkenness. And soon to the end of the chapter, the truth is fellow citizens if you give ground a single inch, there is no stopping place.’

Heather Cox Richardson:

So this is a really lovely moment in a personal way as well because of course, the state of Maine comes into the union because of the Missouri compromise and Maine had wanted to break off from Massachusetts after the war of 1812, and it was not able to do so because southerners said, “We’re not going to let a free state into the Senate unless we have a Southern state as well.” And Mainers were furious about this.

So when Lovejoy is out there talking about not drinking, the idea of temperance came from Maine. It was known originally as the Maine law and Catholicism, which is a big deal up on the frontier of Canada. He’s really saying, “I represent a state that you southerners you slave owners basically screwed over.” So don’t even begin to talk to me about shutting me up. But this moment is a wonderful moment where we’re not just talking about Elijah Lovejoy, and his increasing reform mindedness if you will, for that era, this is really about national politics and people have serious skin in the game.

Joanne Freeman:

About national politics and the careful balance of political power and how the press weighs in on that. Now, Lovejoy’s use of The Observer as an abolitionist sounding board really comes to light after a brutal lynching. In April of 1836, a free black man, a boatman named Francis Macintosh was arrested by two St. Louis deputy sheriffs after he refused to assist them in arresting another man.

After one of the officers told Macintosh that he would probably serve five years in prison for not assisting them in the arrest, Macintosh stole his knife and stabbed both lawmen killing one of them. In response, a mob of white St. Louis residents kidnapped Macintosh from jail and dragged him to a central intersection where they chained him to a tree, piled wood around and up to his knees and lit him on fire. And supposedly he lived for as long as 20 minutes in that kind of torture.

Now, after viewing the remains of Macintosh, Lovejoy condemned the act in an article entitled Awful Murder and Savage Barbarity. Lovejoy editorialized about the experience of viewing Macintosh’s corpse the day after the lynching, arguing that the kind of omen of mob violence that lynching represented made him disturbingly, prophetically wish for death. As Lovejoy wrote, “We stood and gazed for a moment or two upon the blackened and mutilated trunk for that was all which remained of Macintosh before us. And as we turned away in bitterness of heart, we prayed that we might not live for so fearful are our anticipation of the calamities that are to come upon this nation and which unless averted by a speedy and thorough repentance, we have no more doubt will fall upon us than we have that a God of holiness and justice is our Supreme governor that were our work done and were at his will we would gladly be taken away from the evil to come.”

Now, after that much publicized article about Macintosh’s lynching in The Observer pro-slavery forces in St. Louis vandalized, The Observer’s offices. So at that point, Lovejoy in July of 1836, moves his new wife and his baby 25 miles north to the town of Alton in the free state of Illinois. But he also quickly comes under fire there. So after further attacks on his press Lovejoy tries to start a local anti-slavery society.

Again, pro-slavery forces storm the conference and on November 3rd, once again, in this case leading Alton political figures formally voted to request Lovejoy to cease publication and Lovejoy responded, “I do not admit that it is the business of this assembly to decide whether I shall or shall not publish a newspaper in this city. The gentleman have, as the lawyers say made a wrong issue, I have the right to do it. I know that I have the right freely to speak and publish my sentiments subject only to the laws of the land for the abuse of that right. This right was given me by my maker and is solemnly guaranteed to me by the constitution of the United States and of this state.”

But he did recognize that his continued persistence in propounding anti-slavery arguments and essays within his newspaper put him in extreme danger. His press was destroyed three times in quick succession, and he wrote a letter to William Lloyd Garrison’s famous abolitionist newspaper The Liberator explaining his decision to begin arming himself in self-defense. He wrote, “Experience has taught me there is at present, no safety for me and no defense in this place. Every night when I lie down, it is with the deep settled conviction that there are those near me who seek my life. I have resisted this conviction as long as I could, but it has been forced upon me.”

Now on the evening of November 7th, 1837, only a few days after Lovejoy’s dramatic denunciation of the vote against him, 25 men surrounded his offices and after they smashed windows, someone from within shot one of the people outside dead. In return, the mob set Lovejoy’s office, a flame, and shot him four times as he tried to flee. And his killing became a really dramatic cause for abolitionist. For example, James Berneis’s very influential newspaper The Emancipator, published in Cincinnati, reprinted 161 editorials critical of Lovejoy’s murder.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So the murder of Elijah P Lovejoy becomes such a big deal among northerners, that it really begins to symbolize the takeover of American society by this slave power that is crushing the civil liberties and the government of the United States. So in 1838, when he was 28, Abraham Lincoln talked about the lynching of Macintosh when he gave the famous Lyceum address in Springfield, Illinois. And he called for Americans to uphold their institutions and to avoid mob rule.

And when he did, so he included a really vivid reference to Macintosh’s lynching. But then in 1857, he turns to the larger story of American democracy in the free press. When he writes to his friend, who’s an abolitionist, a man from Illinois named the Reverend James Lemon about his experience, looking over the family papers of that family. The reverend’s father, who was also an abolitionist had worked with Thomas Jefferson on drafts of an anti-slavery compact allegedly anyway. But Lincoln was most interested in the fact that family had communicated with Elijah Lovejoy.

He wrote to James Lemen, I will add a few words more as to Elijah P Lovejoy’s case. His letters among your old family notes were of more interest to me than even those of Thomas Jefferson written to your father. Lovejoy’s tragic death for freedom in every sense marked his sad ending as the most important single event that ever happened in the new world.

Joanne Freeman:

Wow.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the sheer ubiquity of the story of Lovejoy’s murder in the 1830s, 1840s, and the 1850s really helped to crystallize the sense that the rights of Americans were being destroyed by Southern enslavers. But there’s also a personal connection here in that Elijah P. Lovejoy was the brother of Owen Lovejoy who moves to Illinois and becomes a representative who is close to Lincoln. They’re both instrumental in the forming Republican Party out there. And those two men Owen and Elijah Lovejoy actually grow up, not in the same town but in the same, very close area in Maine, as Hannibal Hamlin, who’s going to become Lincoln’s first vice president and of Elihu Israel and Cadwallader Washburn, all of whom become major figures in the Republican Party from Illinois, Maine, and Wisconsin.

And they really carry that idea that they are not only defending the American government from encroachment of these people who want to destroy civil liberties, but also that they are defending Elijah P. Lovejoy their brother or fellow Mainer if you will, from his murder by people who did not believe in the right of free speech. There’s been an award given out since 1952 from Colby College in Maine, the Elijah Parish Lovejoy award that’s awarded for courage in journalism. So that Elijah P Lovejoy case is really central to the way we think about what it means to have a free press and why we have a free press in this country.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s obvious as well based on the newspaper coverage of it because part of the reason why this takes on such importance is it’s spread through the press Owen Lovejoy his brother goes to Congress and is attacked in Congress because of his connection with his brother with Elijah Lovejoy. And people comment at the time what Elijah Lovejoy did and the persistence and bravery of what he did and the implications of what he did against the south stayed. And his brother, ultimately it was not a severe attack, but that lingered and the statement that it made to attack a Lovejoy, what it made in the slavery debate was still years later, a power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So that brings up another major moment in the concept of the free press. So here we have with Elijah P Lovejoy, the need of the press not to be stifled because people feel that some topic or another is uncomfortable and they don’t want to talk about something that they feel that shouldn’t be part of the national discussion. But then there is the question of what it means to be part of an independent press. And I’d love to have you talk a little bit Joanne about how the press is actually funded before we get to the independent press. Because I don’t think you understand the rise of the independent press until you understand the idea of the, it’s still independent, but I’m going to call it the captive press.

Joanne Freeman:

I like the captive press. The fact of the matter is from the founding era through a chunk of the 19th century, there are a number of different kinds of newspapers. So there are commercial presses, which obviously are focused on business more than anything else. But when it comes to political newspapers, most of them are funded by a political party of some kind or an important political figure and his allies.

So the idea of an independent and objective press is just not really there in the way we take for granted, newspapers are seen and this is the word that they would use as organs of parties. So they aren’t independent, they’re not supposed to be independent. For the most part, they’re not pretending to be independent although what is significant about it in that time period is that one thing they did do was reprint arguments from opposing newspapers and actually in that way sort of encapsulate and reproduce arguments within their pages. So they’re not independent, they’re party supported in one way or another, but they’re very honest about the fact that they’re in the mix of partisan debate.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and quite literally the mechanism for supporting those newspapers by a party are printing contracts, right?

Joanne Freeman:

So certainly when it comes to newspapers that wanted access in Washington to the government, yeah. If you became the printer that was favored by Congress, you got congressional printing contracts and then you could use that money to support your other journalistic enterprises. So printing contracts were pretty much the only stable way that you could stay in print as a press. When you work in newspapers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, you see these newspapers, the titles come and go and come and go because it was so hard to stay in business.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and the cities are like that too. If you can have the city government printing contract as well. And of course they do try and get some advertisements. So when you have like the rise of calling cards, for example, they make a little bit of money at that. But what they really need is some kind of political connection.

But that changes in the late 19th century. And it changes in the late 19th century, both for financial reasons, but also for political reasons because the political parties have gotten so deeply entrenched and they have become extreme enough that a lot of consumers want to have the news. They don’t want to have such an extreme spin that they feel like they’re not actually getting the real story. So you start to see the rise of political papers that are trying not to be as extreme as it is possible to be.

And the person who really runs with that is Joseph Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer is a really interesting character because he’s an immigrant to the US. He came when he was 17. He’s from Hungary, he’s Jewish and he comes because he wants to fight in the Civil War but quickly he moves down to St. Louis, Missouri again, and he begins to work for Carl Schurz who is a Republican politician who’s trying to get elected to the Senate from Missouri. And Schurz is a newspaper man down there and Pulitzer are really kind of worship Schurz

But what’s interesting about the fact they come from Missouri. I don’t think it’s an accident that the go to Missouri in the same way that Lovejoy starts in Missouri in that in Missouri, you’ve got a political movement coming out of the 1870s that I would argue doesn’t really do it, but tries to be impartial.

It tries to be somewhere between the north and the south, because of course, Missouri is the only state that permitted human enslavement north of the Missouri compromise line. That was the whole point in 1820. So Carl Schurz and Joseph Pulitzer believe that they are capable of telling a middle of the road story, an American middle class story, if you will.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So in 1883, he leaves St. Louis where he had been running the St. Louis Dispatch and he moves to New York where he buys the New York World. Jay Gould had the New York world. He was a railroad magnate and he’s failing at that point. So he sells it to Pulitzer and Pulitzer does something really interesting. He says that instead of catering to the wealthy, the way that the other newspapers do, he is going to try to speak for the American people. So he says his newspaper would be truly democratic, expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses that will serve and battle for the people with earnest sincerity.

Okay, this is 1883. This is when people are starting to get completely bent out of shape about both the idea of corruption in government and the idea of the extremely wealthy. So one Philadelphia man reads the New York World for the first time under Pulitzer’s mast head and says, “I saw at a glance that the emancipation of the newspapers of this country had commenced. That great wrongs were to be righted. That light was to be led in where darkness covered it.”

The idea was to write a paper for the people. And what that’s going to do is it’s going to shift the ways that newspapers are funded. They’re going to be funded by subscriptions or by people paying to buy it and they’re going to be covered by advertising. But one of the kickers to that is that if you’re trying to get really high circulation in order to make your newspaper a success, you’re in real danger of aiming towards sensationalism, because you’re going to get click bait if you will, before we had clicks. So the flip side of having this democratic small de democratic paper was the idea that it was susceptible to creating sensationalism.

Joanne Freeman:

So along those lines, Pulitzer really helps develop the field of investigative journalism. And a great example of that is reporter Nellie Bly, who Pulitzer hires in 1887. And she feigns mental illness to gain admission to the women’s asylum at Blackwell’s island. The abuse and the neglect that she found there so shocked people when they were printed up in her reports for the New York World, that they sparked major reforms and her book version of those newspaper reports, 10 Days In a Madhouse. was a runaway success.

So she’s an investigative reporter getting eyes on the newspaper in that way I suppose but just along the lines of Heather with what you were just saying, that the temptation here when you are selling something and trying to sell subscriptions it’s to potentially move in a more sensationalistic direction, Nellie Bly, is perhaps most famous for attempting to beat Jules Verne’s going around the world in 80 days. That becomes partly, I suppose, an accomplishment, partly a kind of stunt that she becomes very well known for. She does apparently get around the world in 72 days. So I tip my hat to her, but it’s a great example of sometimes I suppose, the thin line between investigation and exposure and revealing things and appealing to the public to get those clicks before there were clicks.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I have read 10 Days In a Madhouse and it is truly horrific. I got to say, I think not as infrequently as one would like about her courage in doing that, because once she was incarcerated in that asylum, she had to trust other people to get her out. But again, like you were saying, the need to get people to read meant that the paper becomes increasingly dependent on its circulation and Pulitzer at one point said, circulation means advertising and advertising means money and money means independence. But that’s going to mean that Pulitzer and later one of his chief competitors, William Randolph Hearst are going to compete for the most sensational stories. And that is not necessarily going to take us in a good direction.

Joanne Freeman:

That kind of sensationalistic reporting, not surprisingly can have and sometimes did have a broad impact. So for example, it has an impact on the carrying out of the Spanish American war, the newspaper coverage, the way it’s covered and what is emphasized or not emphasized has an impact on actual foreign policy events. So sensationalism is commercially good, but has a real power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And while most people know about the lead up to the Spanish American war and the yellow journalism that insisted that the Americans had to go into that war, which is by the way very complicated, fewer people know that this focus on exposing political leaders actually led to a really important Supreme Court decision.

And it involves some of the same people shortly after this. When Theodore Roosevelt is president, he is instrumental in the revolution that leads to the creation of Panama. And of course is important in the construction of the Panama Canal. And that’s quite a complicated set of events. But right before the election of 1908, when Teddy Roosevelt is about to step down, he wants his chosen successor to become president. And that’s going to be William Howard Taft. So the New York World prints a series of stories that say that Theodore Roosevelt’s family and William Howard Taft’s family have made gazillions of dollars although the word gazillions is coming from me, not from The World of dollars off of the second phase of canal building.

Of course, Taft is elected nonetheless, but it’s pretty clear that they’re putting this story out there because they’re trying to undercut Taft’s presidential campaign. And shortly after Taft is elected in November of 1908, Congress opens an investigation into the reporting. Now at this point, Pulitzer is an old man and he was not actually involved in the series of stories when they came out. But Congress opens this investigation and Roosevelt issues an absolutely scathing statement about Pulitzer. He says, “It is therefore a high national duty to bring to justice this vilifier of the American people, this man who wantonly and wickedly and without one shadow of justification seeks to blacken the character of reputable, private citizens, and to convict the federal government of his own country.”

Pulitzer then replied, “The president can’t muzzle the world. The persecution, if it succeeds will place every newspaper in the country completely at the mercy of any autocratic, vainglorious president, who is willing to prostitute his authority for the gratification of his personal malice.” And he said that the paper, regardless of whether or not what the paper had said was true there is some indication that in fact, they simply made up the story. Although later on, there’s a big fight about whether or not it might be true.

He said, “Whether or not the story is true, the paper was letting in the light on a public controversy.” So Congress opens an investigation and then in February of 1909, Taft’s attorney general opens a liable suit against the New York World and it eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court. And in that eventual decision, which is the United States V. the Press Publishing Company, the Supreme court basically sides with Pulitzer because it says that there is no legitimate federal liable law.

The federal government can’t sue a newspaper for libel because there’s no law against that under our system in 1911. Newspapers across the country say that this is as they said, a great victory for freedom of the press and Pulitzer said, “The decision of the Supreme Court is so sweeping that no other president will be tempted to follow the footsteps of Theodore Roosevelt no matter how greedy he may be for power, no matter how resentful of opposition.”

Joanne Freeman:

Another legacy of Pulitzer was his role in helping create both the Pulitzer Prizes and the Columbia School of Journalism. So in may of 1904, Pulitzer wrote an op-ed in the North American Review, advocating for founding, what would eventually become the Columbia School of Journalism. Basically the first American journalism school. And Pulitzer wrote, “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together, enable disinterested public spirited press with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical mercenary demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mold the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

And I have to say here, the quotes, Heather that you’ve just been reading and this one too, I can hear newbie in the background, actually chirping very happily, these guys really knew how to swing around a word. As newspaper men, they are so good at making these kinds of statements that really resonate, that jump off the page.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things that I find really powerful about the era in America, really at least into the 1970s, is that thought leaders and politicians couch things in terms of why it matters for democracy. And that makes it so much easier to understand. It’s not a question of, “Oh, I didn’t see your press badge so you can’t come in.” Or, “Let’s just break some heads,” or whatever. Some of the things are that people say that seemed to be like a teaspoon deep. It matters that somebody was not allowed at a political rally, because if you can’t get into a political rally, you can’t tell people what was said there. And they can’t make good decisions about their government if they don’t know what the people who want to run that government are saying. And that really came through with people like Pulitzer.

Joanne Freeman:

I think that’s true. And I think that’s for good reason because the time period that you were talking about here, as people not taking things for granted is also the time period when these things are first evolving and developing. So people aren’t taking things for granted, they’re watching the evolution of a free press and a powerful press partly through technology, partly through events, building on events. You’re not going to take something for granted if you’re watching it happen.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That brings up the third thing we wanted to talk about. And that’s the Fairness Doctrine and the Fairness Doctrine comes out of exactly the period we’re talking about. And the idea behind it comes out of the Federal Radio Commission, which was formed in 1927 because radio, after it really takes off in America in 1920 becomes very aggressive very quickly and people are trying to grab audiences with that same kind of sensationalism that we just talked about Pulitzer and Hurst fighting over.

And in 1929, the Federal Radio Commission begins to enforce the idea that people who have broadcast licenses have to provide equal time for opposing political views on the radio. And what they say is the public interest requires ample play for the free and fair competition of opposing views. And the commission believes that the principle applies to all discussions of issues of importance to the public.

Until 1940, the Federal Radio Commission also pretty much forbade radio commentators from explicitly revealing their political views. And with the advent of television and the transition of the FRC into the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, the ban on personal politics was lifted. And in instead in 1949, the FCC declared a two part enforcement guideline for radio and television politics.

Joanne Freeman:

And basically number one, they stated that every licensee must devote a reasonable portion of broadcast time to the discussion and consideration of controversial issues of public importance. And number two, that in doing so, the broadcaster must be fair. That is the broadcaster must affirmatively endeavor to make facilities available for the expression of contrasting viewpoints, held by responsible elements, with respect to the controversial issues presented, which is a very roundabout way of saying that contrasting viewpoints need to be expressed and that there should be facilities available for that expression.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This always reminds me of Gilda Radner on the early Saturday night live and that character, Emily Litella she had, who used to come on weekend update and always get whatever the current issue was completely wrong. So for example, they would have a story on euthanasia and she would come on and give an opposing viewpoint about how she actually really liked youth in Asia. And of course, then somebody would have to say, “No, we actually weren’t talking about young Chinese people, we were talking about killing human beings and she’d be like, “Oh, nevermind.”

Joanne Freeman:

You have to say it in the right voice though heather, “Nevermind.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Oh man, those early years were great. Anyway, but it’s a really important concept. And it’s something that the Supreme Court defends in 1969 in a case in which a Pennsylvania radio station in a town called Red Lion, Pennsylvania, tried to argue that the FCC could not enforce the idea of opposing viewpoints. They put on the radio a 15 minute broadcast as part of a Christian crusade series in which they castigated a man who had written a book critical of Barry Goldwater.

And the man who wrote the book, a man named Fred Cook, contacted the radio station. He said, “Wait, I want to rebut this.” And Red Lion said, “Well, if you’re going to rebut it, you have to pay a fee of $5 in order to do that.” And the author then contacted the FCC. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the FCC. Justice Byron White delivered the majority opinion in which he argued that the scarcity of the airwaves and the intent of the first amendment to offer diverse political views made the Fairness Doctrine constitutional. And the guy who had made the original statement argued that his first amendment rights were being violated by forcing him to give air time to an opposing view.

White said, “It is the purpose of the first amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail. Rather than to countenance monopolization of that market. Whether it be by the government itself or a private licensee, it is the right of the public to receive suitable access to social political aesthetic, moral, and other ideas and experiences which is crucial here. So that Supreme Court decision interprets the first amendment as the rights of Americans to a full marketplace of ideas.

But crucially in that Fairness Doctrine was the idea of accuracy. That’s really going to matter when Ronald Reagan becomes president because Ronald Reagan supports the idea that the Fairness Doctrine privileges what people in his political party called the liberal media. And what they meant by that was the idea that the media depended on fact based argument. And they felt that that concept of fact based media privileged the liberal definition of America, privileging liberal ideas.

And they were trying to push a series of beliefs that were based in ideology not so much in fact. Reagan subscribed to that and he supported the idea of repealing the Fairness Doctrine. He was not the only one. There were people on both sides of the political spectrum who disagreed with it, but he and his appointees on the FCC were the driving forces behind the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which the federal communications commission drops out of use in 1987.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And Reagan says, “We must not ignore the obvious intent of the first amendment which is to promote vigorous public debate and a diversity of viewpoints in the public forum as a whole, not in any particular medium, let alone in any particular journalistic outlet.” Because this is 1987, of course. And in 1988, we get the launching and really taking off of talk radio. Talk radio, of course is not fact based. It certainly doesn’t provide an alternative viewpoint and it’s monopolized early on by people like Rush Limbaugh.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So the idea that Reagan is announcing here is that an individual outlet doesn’t have to be fair and balanced because having a multitude of ideas across the spectrum should enable that same sort of equality that the Fairness Doctrine enforced in individual media outlets.

Joanne Freeman:

So that originally the idea was there weren’t a lot of outlets and so it was particularly important for them to be fair. And essentially what’s being described here is the idea that there are so many outlets and so many ways in which people can get news that each one individually doesn’t have to be as balanced or as fair. And that this regulation thus is not important because of the evolution of this form of the press, this form of media.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the other thing you get right about the same shortly after that, by the time you get into the 1990s is the rise of cable. And the rise of cable news means we’ve got this extraordinary proliferation of new media and new ideas. But one of the other things that we have not grappled with when we talk about free press in this moment is that with these new technologies, we also get the ability to manipulate the access of those technologies to the public.

So for example, the Fox News channel, when it rises in the 1990s has a funding package that makes it very widely used, not based on the ideas in it, but based on the way that it is distributed to cable companies. And similarly, it becomes ubiquitous in certain venues that mean that the issue is less, there’s a giant marketplace of ideas and you can watch whatever you want. But rather that, because you now have the idea of outlets that specialize in one thing or another, what you then can do if you’re trying to change the political direction of this country is guarantee that your outlet is the only one that actually gets seen. So the overlap of ideas and access becomes really important after the end of the Fairness Doctrine.

Joanne Freeman:

And so a different kind of marketplace here is asserting itself. We talked about a marketplace of ideas, and now what we’re talking about is pure commercialism, and capitalism, really steering the way, letting loose, what is available, enabling certain outlets to be more accessible and to have a louder voice than others. We’ve now gotten to this point where individual outlets really don’t have to think about being fair to opposing viewpoints. It’s not hard to sit here and connect the dots and see where we are now and see all of the challenges inherent in that Newton Minnow who’s a really interesting character. He’s wrapped up in a lot of this. He was the chair of the FCC appointed by John F. Kennedy. He recently said he would like to see the Fairness Doctrine reinstated. And here’s why he thinks that’s a good idea. Quote, if you don’t agree on facts, I don’t see how you can have a civilized discussion. An interesting statement that is interesting to make in today’s climate, in which facts are one of the many things that it’s difficult to determine among the many outlets which are now accessible to us today.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it still matters just as much as it ever did in terms of protecting democracy, not so much necessarily being concerned about giving voice to an opposing viewpoint so much as the lack of giving voice to opposing viewpoint has brought actual facts into question where there’s a significant portion of this country right now that adheres to something that is a lie, and you can’t really have a democracy in which people are living in an alternative reality. And you see that in authoritarian countries where they have very clear stories of their country. They just happen to be completely false. And if that’s all you hear, how do you know it’s false?

Joanne Freeman:

And you could see based on everything that we were talking about today, how that is intertwined with just the very foundation of democracy. If a democratic form of government is grounded on free and fair electoral contests, by the public voting based on the information that they have on the candidates and the issues and the ideals that they support, if you don’t have access to the information that will allow you to make an informed choice in a democracy, you are eroding the nature of elections. You are chipping away at the basic foundation of democracy, which is we, the people making choices in contests and picking a candidate. And if we don’t like them making a different choice at the next election at the foundation of free and fair elections is the ability of the American people to know what they’re voting for, to be informed, to know what the government has done so that they know whether they’d want to support it or not.

And just as we said, at the beginning of this episode, the more that the public can’t see and can’t understand what the government is doing, the more in the dark, they are, the easier it is for governments to be tyrannical and to seize power. You can see all of the reasons why a free press is really the major support of a functional democratic government. And you can see many of the reasons now why some people who are particularly eager for power that is not necessarily democratic in authoritarian nations, and otherwise call a press a free press the enemy of the people. It’s the opposite of what’s true. The press is only the enemy of the people if you don’t want the people to have a voice.