Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them."

--Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787. ME 6:57
http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1289

...but 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.
--Extract from Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette
http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/425

Memo to Donald Trump: Thomas Jefferson invented hating the media

By Lindsey Bever February 18
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/17/trumps-war-with-the-media-isnt-new-thomas-jefferson-railed-about-newspaper-lies-too/?utm_term=.858e5514d95f

During his time as U.S. minister to France, Thomas Jefferson penned a letter to a statesman from Virginia, waxing poetic about the importance of a free press.

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Jefferson wrote to Edward Carrington in 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

Those words would help identify the Founding Father as a champion of the press.

But as Jefferson was writing them, scholars say, he did not foresee that newspapers would become a partisan tool for warring political factions in a climate of unrest and uncertainty over the fate of a nascent nation.

By the time he was approaching his presidency, anxieties were high and newspapers had taken a critical stance. Jefferson in turn had taken critical tone with them, at least in his in personal letters, in which he often excoriated the press — much as the 45th president, Donald Trump, would do more than 200 years later.

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” Jefferson said then.

“FAKE NEWS media … makes up stories and 'sources,'” Trump tweets now.

Trump has repeatedly lambasted the media, first for its coverage of his presidential campaign and, now, of his administration. During a combative 75-minute news conference Thursday, the president continued to air his grievances, saying, “I’ve never seen more dishonest media than, frankly, the political media.”

At the time Jefferson wrote the storied words about press freedom that journalists have since embraced as a mantra, “his view of the press was uncluttered with the experience he was going to soon acquire,” said Joseph Ellis, a U.S. historian who has written a biography about Jefferson, “American Sphinx.”

“His view of the press was going to change,” he said.

Jefferson was a controversial presidential candidate, portrayed in the press as a Francophile and an atheist and was later rumored to have had children with a slave at Monticello (now widely believed by historians). Many people were worried he was putting the survival of the republic at risk — and that sentiment was echoed in the press, historians say.

Then during his presidency, the historians say, he was heavily criticized for his actions, namely the Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo Act of 1807.

In 1796, a year before he became vice president, Jefferson wrote a letter to George Washington, saying that “from a very early period of my life, I had laid it down as a rule of conduct, never to write a word for the public papers.”

But Ellis, the historian, noted that “Jefferson never said about the press what Trump says about the press.”

Still, Ellis said, “Jefferson recognized the press as one of the pillars of the society we wanted; but when he came under criticism in a big way, he used his powers to censor them.”

In a 1993 op-ed in the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Lewis wrote:

In 1798 the Federalists pushed through Congress a Sedition Act making it a crime to publish false, malicious comments about the President or Congress. (They exempted Vice President Jefferson from this protection against abuse.)

The aim of the law was to silence the country's main Jeffersonian newspapers in the run-up to the election of 1800. Their editors and owners were indeed prosecuted, some for mere critical opinions or lampooning of President Adams.

Jefferson and James Madison, the author of the First Amendment, worked to rouse the public against the Sedition Act. They argued that the Federalists, by trying to silence speech critical of politicians, were taking America back to the British system — the tyranny of George III. And their arguments persuaded many, contributing to Jefferson's defeat of Adams.

When Jefferson took office, on March 4, 1801, he pardoned all those who had been convicted under the Sedition Act. In his Inaugural Address he opened his arms to his bitter opponents — and set out what I think is the true American attitude toward freedom of speech.

But once Jefferson was in office, he tried to censor the critical press.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/17/trumps-war-with-the-media-isnt-new-thomas-jefferson-railed-about-newspaper-lies-too/?utm_term=.858e5514d95f