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Edited on Fri Jun-18-04 11:35 AM by redqueen
They have a duty, and they are not doing it.
"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.
"The only security of all is 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." Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823.
"The most effectual engines for pacifying a nation are the public papers...A despotic government always keeps a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invent and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers . This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." Thomas Jefferson to G.K. van Hogendorp, October 13, 1785.
"Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it." Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 1786.
"I am for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents." Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1799.
"No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions." Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1804.
"Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust them for light." Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 1799.
"Considering the great importance to the public liberty of the freedom of the press, and the difficulty of submitting it to very precise rules, the laws have thought it less mischievous to give greater scope to its freedom than to the restraint of it." Thomas Jefferson to the Spanish Commissioners, 1793.
"This is a country which is afraid to read nothing, and which may be trusted with anything, so long as its reason remains unfettered by law." Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Milligan, 1816.
"Our people, merely for want of intelligence which they may rely on, are become lethargic and insensible of the state they are in." Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1777.
"The materials now bearing on the public mind will infallibly restore it to its republican soundness...if the knowledge of facts can only be disseminated among the people." Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 1799.
"I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world of their time, whereas the accounts they have read in the newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them...but no details can be relied on." Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807.
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