United States Constitution
Amendment 1 - Freedom of Religion, Speech, and the Press
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
In the Anglo-American tradition, freedom of the press and freedom of speech begin with John Milton. Here are lines from the famous polemic published in 1644, entitled Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for
the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parliament of England. In the following short passage, note how freedom
of expression is intrinsically linked to the concept of truth.
And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the
earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and
prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever
knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?
Two remarks: First, Milton is saying
that when ideas are presented openly, truth shall prevail. Second, the truth
Milton speaks of is a concept with philosophical, theological, scientific, and political significance. That is, truth (and openness) is central to
our modern outlook. I will now endeavor
to present a few points that dilate on the implications of Milton’s idea.
In A
Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765), John Adams writes:
Liberty
cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a
right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator,
who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know;
but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable,
indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I
mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees, of
the people; and if the cause, the interest, and trust, is insidiously betrayed,
or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that
they themselves have deputed, and to constitute other and better agents,
attorneys and trustees.
The
same tenor is carried forward by Thomas Jefferson, here in the Second Inaugural
Address (1805):
…[T]he [American] experiment [in a Free
Press] is noted to prove that, since truth and reason have maintained their
ground against false opinions in league with false facts, the press, confined
to truth, needs no other legal restraint; the public judgment will correct
false reasoning and opinions on a full hearing of all parties....
In
a 16 January, 1787 letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, Jefferson writes:
The
basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object
should be to keep that right; and 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. But I should
mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.
In a 28 June, 1804
letter to Judge John Tyler,
Jefferson pointedly conjoins the notion of truth to free expression:
No
experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we
trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and
truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the
avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the
press. It is, therefore, the first [freedom] shut up by those who fear the
investigation of their actions.
Once
more, Jefferson argues the point, here in a 6 January 1816 Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey:
If
a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it
expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government
have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their
constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people
themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press
is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.
In
a 31 October, 1823 Letter to Adamantios Koraes, Jefferson punctuates the idea,
concluding with an appeal to ethics that suggests Aristotle:
I
have stated that the constitutions of our several States vary more or less in
some particulars. But there are certain
principles in which all agree, and which all cherish as vitally essential to the protection of the life,
liberty, property, and safety of the citizen [...] Freedom of the press, subject only to
liability for personal injuries. This formidable
censor of the public functionaries, by arraigning them at the tribunal of
public opinion, produces reform peaceably, which must otherwise be done by
revolution. It is also the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man,
and improving him as a rational, moral, and social being.
Moving to the Twentieth Century, consider
these lines from John F. Kennedy’s Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association (27 April
1961):
Without debate, without
criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can
survive. ... And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment —
the [press is the] only business in America specifically protected by the
Constitution — not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the
trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants” —
but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our
opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate
and sometimes even anger public opinion. This means greater coverage and
analysis of international news — for it is no longer far away and foreign but
close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding
of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that
government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the
fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security.
... And so it is to the printing press — to the recorder of man’s deeds, the
keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news — that we look for strength
and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to
be: free and independent.
