Op-Ed: Press Freedom Day and You

Opinion by Dean Miller

On this Press Freedom Day, I’m less worried about the freedom of “The Press” than I am about your determination to do what James Madison knew democracy would demand citizens do: digest, debate, dissent and defenestrate.

A free press is essential to that. But only if citizens do what they must to carry through with this experiment in self-rule.

I’m unpopular among journalists for saying it, but the First Amendment did not protect our profession or our employers. It protected your use of that re-purposed wine press by which Gutenberg squashed absolute power. You were never to be restricted in knowing about government, debating it, dissenting and, when necessary, throwing the bums out.

Mass-replication and dissemination of knowledge enabled the many to learn what the few had long hoarded for themselves and to use that knowledge to muster a crowd of like thinkers.

Call our fellow Washingtonian William O. Douglas a liberal if you like, but as a Supreme Court Justice, he demonstrated just how far freedom of the press goes. In the Pentagon Papers matter, he wrote:

The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information. It is common knowledge that the First Amendment was adopted against the widespread use of the common law of seditious libel to punish the dissemination of material that is embarrassing to the powers-that-be. . .

“Tyrants (rightly) fear those who have digested the reality of what their government is doing, can meaningfully debate it, dissent and, if necessary, defenestrate the powerful.”

What the Reformation had taught our enlightened framers was that the real battle for human rights would only be won on the kind of open field where falsehood is no match for truth: one where everybody knows what’s happening, even borderline Top Secret stuff about how we lied our way into the Vietnam War.

Madison and the rest of the framers who wrote “Freedom of the Press” into our constitution knew impunity was what corrupted the powerful and that impunity only exists in an absence of knowledge.

Tyrants (rightly) fear those who have digested the reality of what their government is doing, can meaningfully debate it, dissent and, if necessary, defenestrate the powerful.

That’s why records get hidden, meetings get closed and spending reports get declared top secret.

Increasingly, though, we are ingesting and digesting information that we allow the powerful to dole out to us. We consume it recklessly and squander our birthright.

In the 1990s, we let anti-social teenagers funded by cynical venture capital hijack the public square. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was maybe a good idea in 1996, when it protected experimenters while they figured out uses for the World Wide Web.

Long after the time of experimentation, when they were already awash in billions of dollars, social media magnates hoodwinked congressional troglodytes intobelieving that companies like Facebook and Twitter still couldn’t possibly be held liable for online defamation, or untruth, or the theft of other people’s creative work. Declaring themselves the de facto public square, they blinked out crocodile tears and declared themselves the “real free speech” protectors.

Meanwhile, captive psychologists trained coders to foment outrage so that the faux public square became an addictive attention sink, profitable to the platforms and not at all good for honest debate based on a balanced and digested diet of facts.

You don’t get to steer attention and claim you’re allowing wide-open debate. And you definitely don’t get to describe yourself as a “free speech absolutist”, as X.com owner Elon Musk does, but then stifle traffic to the accounts of those who disagree with you.

Digesting this on our way to debate, dissent and defenestration is dangerous.

It’s not difficult to imagine Mark Zuckerberg steering online debate away from Section 230 and toward other topics less fraught for Meta.

We already know that Musk has hidden a great deal of the work on the most consequential government actions of the last 100 days: the Department of Government Efficiency’s serial takeover of sensitive data in the hands of federal agencies.

This is the most wealthy human on Earth, whose standard reply to press queries has long been a poop emoji. If that’s not impunity, I don’t know what is.

So, while the economic crisis facing local news makes me, a longtime scribe, sad and nostalgic, I don’t think it’s what we need to focus on during World Press Freedom Day.

No, what we need to focus on is the entire point of this experiment in self-rule: citizens have the right to know what’s done in their name, to debate it, to dissent against it and to replace a government that loses their confidence.

To do that, you have to demand unfettered access to information about your government.

Dean Miller is the former editor of the Port Townsend Leader, former Free Press Editor at the Seattle Times and current managing editor at Lead Stories, a fact check agency operating in the U.S., Asia, Europe and the Middle East.