Free Press

[David Lockmiller]

The Revealing Case of a Kansas Judge and a Search Warrant
New York Times Aug. 20, 2023

By Gregory P. Magarian, professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, where he teaches and writes about constitutional law, with emphasis on the freedom of expression. He is the author of “Managed Speech: The Roberts Court’s First Amendment.”

“The only security of all,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “is in a free press.” A healthy democracy needs robust, independent journalism, shielded from government assaults, in every community. An attack on press freedom in rural Kansas, or anywhere else, is an attack on democracy everywhere.

Extract from Thomas Jefferson [letter] to Lafayette
Monticello Nov. 4. 1823.

"[B]ut the only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted, when permitted freely to be expressed. the agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary to keep the waters pure."

Abraham Lincoln Lecture before the Springfield Library Association, February 22, 1860:

"But to return to the consideration of printing, it is plain that it is but the other half, and in reality the better half, of writing; and that both together are but the assistants of speech in the communication of thoughts between man and man. When man was possessed of speech alone, the chances of invention, discovery, and improvement were very limited . . . . At length printing came. It gave ten thousand copies of any written matter quite as cheaply as ten were given before; and consequently a thousand minds were brought into the field where there was but one before. This was a great gain -- and history shows a great change corresponding to it -- in point of time. I will venture to consider it the true termination of that period called 'the dark ages.'"