Posted
on August 5, 2014
If
a powerful leader such as a mayor, governor, or president was doing
something very wrong, and a newspaper reporter found out about the
wrongdoing...should he publish his findings?
I
hope you answered, “Of course!”
But...this
leader is powerful. And he or she is part of the government.
Wouldn't the government official be able to make a lot of trouble for
the reporter?
Once
again, I hope you are answering that the freedom of the press (and we
include podcasts and TV reporting and radio broadcasts and blogs as
part of the “press”) is very important to a free society. The
people MUST be informed of the wrongdoing of their elected officials,
and the informers themselves must be protected.
The question of the day is, how did “freedom of the press” get started?
The question of the day is, how did “freedom of the press” get started?
Today
is the historic anniversary of an important step toward that freedom.
German-born
John Peter Zenger was a publisher and printer working in New York
City. He actually started a publication in order to express his
criticisms of the colonial governor William Cosby.
Cosby
didn't like being criticized in print. He issued an official
proclamation that said that Zenger's New York Weekly Journal
was filled with “divers
scandalous, virulent, false and seditious reflections.”
And
then Cosby sent police officers out to arrest Zenger on charges of
“seditious libel.” After more than eight months in prison, after
two trials and several lawyers, the public was behind Zenger and
hanging on every word of the trial. The main defense lawyer, Andrew
Hamilton, pleaded the case directly to the jury (because the judge
owed his position to Cosby and had been showing bias at every turn.
And
how did the lawyer defend Zenger? He obviously HAD published the
things that Governor Cosby said he had – the printed papers were
right there, for all to see! Hamilton's argument was that, if he
could prove that the things Zenger had said were TRUE, it wasn't
libel.
That's
not how things were seen back then. There was an argument that “a
libel is no less a libel for being true.” In British law, back
then, truthful criticisms of others were the worst sort of libel,
because if the criticisms were true, the criticized couldn't easily
refute them.
Hamilton
argued that people ought to be able to criticize their government.
Zenger, writing as Cato in his Journal, said, “The exposing
therefore of public wickedness, as it is a duty which every man owes
to the truth and his country, can never be a libel in the nature of
things...”
On
this date in 1735, the jury found Zenger innocent of libel. The truth
won out!
Did
you know...?
Libel
is now generally defined as false statements appearing in print (or
via audio visual media) that harm the reputation of a business,
individual, product, government, or even group.
Slander
is the same thing but spoken rather than published or broadcast.
Defamation
is the general term that includes libel and slander.
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