The Press

Undoubtedly the American Revolution that began in 1775 and the French Revolution of 1789 would not have been possible without the printing press. The power of the press was recognized several decades previously, in the 1735 trial of Peter Zenger in New York (see Zenger's Case), in which a jury acquitted this printer of libel against the colonial government—defying the presiding judge's direction to return a guilty verdict. Benjamin Franklin, a signer of both the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1789), made his early fortune and reputation as a printer and publisher in Pennsylvania.

At the time of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, the framers of the Constitution opted first to get the Constitution ratified and then draft a bill of rights and present it for ratification also. The First Amendment, contained in that Bill of Rights (1791), attests to the importance that Americans place on a free press. “Congress shall make no law … ,” it states, “abridging the freedom of … the press.…” Enshrined in the First Amendment as one of four basic freedoms, along with freedom of religion, speech, and assembly (see Assembly and Association), freedom of the press was never intended to be an absolute right. Although this freedom can be abused and misused like other rights, citizens of a constitutional democracy are far safer with a vigorous and aggressive free press and its occasional mistakes than without it.

[Page p373]Before the Constitution was even a decade old, however, Congress in 1798 enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts—laws that permitted prosecution of editors for false and malicious writings against the government and for inciting opposition to any act of Congress or the president. These acts, whose constitutionality was questionable from the beginning, were strongly criticized by Thomas Jefferson, which inured to his benefit in the presidential election of 1800, and they were allowed to lapse after two years.

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