Donald Trump and many of his supporters have explicitly promised to overturn American democracy, using Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” Hungarian model — where the press is controlled, political opposition sidelined or imprisoned, and oligarchs run the government — as their model.
But you rarely hear that from our media.
Back on May 5th, Semafor’s Ben Smith interviewed New York Times Editor Joe Kahn, who echoed a perspective that seems widespread across America’s mainstream media newsrooms: that their job is to report what they consider “news,” but not to defend democracy itself.
His exact quote was:
Kahn has been extensively criticized for his and the Times’ unwillingness to use their ability to choose and frame news stories that highlight Trump’s naked threat to democracy and Biden’s robust defense of it, presenting them instead as merely two “normal” candidates’ agendas.
Defending democracy is part of their job, and an essential one, at that.
Which raises a vital question, beyond all the political and partisan sturmund drang: Does the American press have a historic and even constitutional obligation to defend democracy and explicitly call out threats to it?
There is only one industry that is specifically protected — or even mentioned — by the Framers in the Constitution. It’s not the defense industry, the transportation business, or even banking, all necessary and foundational to the development of a safe nation and thriving business economy: Exclusively, it’s the press.
The Founders and Framers did this because they explicitly believed that a free and independent press was a necessary prerequisite to a functioning democratic republic. That it was as essential as a functioning legislative, executive, or judicial branch of government. That, in fact, none of those three could truly be held to account when they crept or bolted toward upending democracy without a press explicitly defending our form of government itself.
On June 15, 1780, almost a decade before the Constitution was ratified and modern America came into existence, the legislature of Massachusetts laid it out in Article XVI of their constitution:
They weren’t the first nor the last; North Carolina, on December 18, 1776, just five months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, added Article XV to their Constitution:
Multiple other states similarly mentioned freedom of the press in their state constitutions and laws, although those two made clearest their belief that the press was an “essential” “bulwark of liberty” if their states were to function as democracies.
Following his attendance at the Constitutional Convention (where freedom of the press was discussed, but only added later with the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791), Ben Franklin noted:
In other words, without a functioning press explicitly defending our form of government, the system of checks-and-balances between the three branches of government cribbed from Montesquieu couldn’t truly function.
The “father of the Constitution” James Madison made clear his belief that the press had an obligation to defend democracy, writing in his resolution from Virginia:
Even George Washington chimed in:
In 1786, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights author Thomas Jefferson made it explicit:
In the third year of his presidency (1804), Jefferson — in the face of vicious attacks in the Federalist newspapers — doubled down:
In that, he was referring to the battle royal he’d won, defending freedom of the press, just four years earlier.
It’s one of the most fascinating — and, given Trump’s promises to shut down and imprison “fake news” reporters and publications that criticize him — prescient stories that most Americans (including, apparently, New York Times Editor Joe Kahn) know nothing about.
Both Federalist John Adams and Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, for example, hated the news coverage they were getting back in the day and Adams’ overreaction is a cautionary tale for those in the media who don’t think a vital part of their job is to report aggressively on threats to democracy.
It started in 1798 when Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin and editor of the Philadelphia newspaper the Aurora, began to speak out against the policies of then-President John Adams.
Bache supported then-Vice President Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party (today called the Democratic Party) when President John Adams led the conservative Federalists (who today would be philosophically similar to Republicans).
Bache attacked Adams in an editorial, calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.”
To be sure, Bache wasn’t the only one attacking Adams in 1798. His Aurora was one of about 20 independent newspapers aligned with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, and many were openly questioning Adams’ policies and ridiculing Adams’ fondness for formality and grandeur.
On the Federalist side, conservative newspaper editors were equally outspoken. Noah Webster wrote that Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans were “the refuse, the sweepings of the most depraved part of mankind from the most corrupt nations on earth.” Another Federalist characterized the Democratic-Republicans as “democrats, momocrats and all other kinds of rats.”
But while Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans had learned to develop a thick skin, University of Missouri-Rolla history professor Larry Gragg points out in an October 1998 article in American History magazine that Bache’s writings sent Adams and his wife into a self-righteous frenzy.
Abigail wrote to her husband and others that Benjamin Franklin Bache was expressing the “malice” of a man possessed by Satan. The Democratic-Republican newspaper editors were engaging, she said, in “abuse, deception, and falsehood,” and Bache was a “lying wretch.”
Abigail insisted that her husband and Congress must act to punish Franklin’s grandson for his “most insolent and abusive” words about her husband and his administration. His “wicked and base, violent and calumniating abuse” must be stopped, she demanded.
Abigail Adams wrote that Bache’s “abuse” being “leveled against the Government” of the United States (her husband) could even plunge the nation into a “civil war.”
Worked into a frenzy by the Adams’ and the rightwing Federalist newspapers of the day, Federalist senators and congressmen — who that year controlled both legislative houses along with the presidency — came to the defense of Adams by passing a series of four laws that came to be known together as the Alien and Sedition Acts.
The vote was so narrow — 44 to 41 in the House of Representatives — that in order to ensure passage the lawmakers wrote a sunset provision into their most odious parts: those laws, unless renewed, would expire the last day of John Adams’ first term of office, March 3, 1801.
Ignoring the First Amendment’s protections of the press so he could pursue his vengeance, President Adams ordered his “unpatriotic” opponents who were writing for or publishing Democratic-Republican newspapers arrested, and specified that only the 100% Federalist judges on the........