Democracy Needs the Press as the ‘Opposition Party’
The Founding Fathers understood opinion journalism as key for informing the public, by presenting another point of view than the president’s.
Hooray for opinion journalism.
Photographer: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images
What’s the main value in a free press? To hear the press tell it — as in many of the 350-plus editorials published in coordination last week in response to the president's anti-press rhetoric — the answer is factual, objective coverage of events.
But that’s not what the framers of the Constitution thought, or what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had in mind when he crafted modern free-press jurisprudence during World War I. It also doesn’t match how most newspaper writers thought of themselves until the emergence of journalism as a “profession” in the post-World War II period.