Media and National Security

The relationship between the media and the government as it relates to matters of national security. The right to a free press has been in conflict with the government's mandate to defend the nation from the very beginning of American democracy.

Alien and Sedition Acts

In late 18th-century America, a vocal and free press—as practiced by Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin, and others—spread revolutionary ideas throughout the colonies. However, the early U.S. government tried to muzzle the press on matters concerning national security. In 1798, the first efforts to restrain the press in the interest of national security took place in the U.S. Senate.

Federalists and Republicans (the major political parties of the day) were deeply divided over the French Revolution. The Republicans heralded the overthrow of the French monarchy, the end of aristocratic privilege, and a new constitutional government in Paris. The Federalists saw these developments as the degeneration of legitimate government into mob rule. Federalist concerns were heightened by revolutionary violence in France and the spread of revolution to Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, and on the Italian peninsula. Federalists were further alarmed by rumors of a possible invasion of America by a French army supported by 20,000 immigrants and American traitors. The crisis reached a fever pitch when a letter was found outside the home of President John Adams containing information about an alleged French plot to burn Philadelphia and massacre its citizens.

In the wake of these incidents, the Federalists passed four laws designed to prevent domestic subversion by foreign enemies. Two of the acts, the Alien Enemies Act and the Alien Friends Act, gave the president the power to deport immigrants who threatened national security. The other new laws, the Naturalization Act and the Sedition Act, were viewed as efforts by the Federalists to destroy the opposing Republican Party, which had strong support among the immigrant population. The Naturalization Act extended the residency requirement for citizenship from 5 to 14 years. The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish statements that opposed the government. In the Federalist view, Republican newspapers, which printed scurrilous statements, misrepresentations, or plain lies about President Adams and the Federalist Party, were guilty of seditious libel.

Almost immediately, prosecutions began under the Sedition Act. Benjamin Bache, the editor of the Philadelphia Aurora and a strident and vociferous critic of Adams, was arrested even before the Sedition Act was signed. Bache characterized Adams as “old, querulous, bald, blind, crippled, [and] toothless” and was charged with “libeling the President and the Executive Government in a manner tending to excite sedition and opposition to the laws.”

Over the next two years, 17 people were indicted under the Sedition Act, and 10 were convicted. Most were journalists, but citizens were also targeted for criticizing the president in public. Congressman Matthew Lyon, a Republican from Vermont, was indicted by a federal grand jury after he wrote an article in the summer of 1798 lambasting Adams for his “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice.”

U.S. Supreme Court justices, sitting as circuit court judges, presided over the sedition trials. The judges, all Federalists, rejected the efforts of defendants and their counsel to challenge the constitutionality of the law and handed down tough sentences. Many of the editors spent three or four months in jail, although none received the two-year maximum sentence.

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