Wikileaks ca. 1798
Everyone loves a Free Press until they are confronted with one.
The Founders of the United States loved a Free Press so much that they enshrined the concept in the very First Amendment of the US Consitutition:
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.
Congress shall make no law…
Well you couldn’t get clearer than that.
And when the Colonists had been busy printing all kinds of stuff about how terrible the King of England was, they were all for a free press.
That kind of publication, done in England, would have gotten them thrown in jail or executed.
So it was more than a bit strange when, in 1798, a mere 12 years after the Constitution was ratified, that the Congress was busy drafting four laws that were specifically designed to abridge freedom of speech and the press.
These were called The Alien and Sedition Acts.
They were signed into law by President John Adams and they were specifically designed to ‘protect The United States from aliens of foreign powers – or their agents in the USA”.
Kind of like The Patriot Act.
It’s always ‘national security’.
And what exactly was it that was so scary?
Why, it was the power of the printing press. In this case, specifically in the hands of one Dr. Thomas Cooper who was writing that Adams had a ‘bias towards Britain’. It was also Vermonter Matthew Lyon who published the Republican newspaper, The Scourge of Aristocracy. He was fined and jailed.
Yes, a Free Press is great so long as ‘we’ can control the contents.
If, however, a Free Press suddenly becomes ‘dangerous’ then it has to be ‘controlled’.
People have to be arrested.
In fact, 25 newspaper editors, including the grandson of Benjamin Franklin were arrested and jailed.
Thomas Jefferson, upon his election in 1800 pardoned and freed all those who had been victims of The Alien and Sedition Acts, and later historians have held them to be unconstitutional.
Now we come to a new technology.
Not the printing press, but the web.
And Wikileaks.
Sure, it’s embarassing.
And there’s much more to come.
But on one has accused Julian Assange of lying.
No one argues that the information in Wikileaks is not true or truthful.
Like I said, everyone loves a Free Press until they are confronted with one.
Well, now we are.
Does ‘no law’ really mean ‘no law’?
Or only if those in power are not injured?
