The State s. the Press

May 03, 2010 Editorial

In 1852, the editorial writer of “The Times” responded to Lord Derby’s assertion that the press, which aspires to share the influence of statesmen, must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen:

“If the first of these propositions be established, the second follows as a matter of course; and we, of all men, are the least disposed to lower the proper functions or to deny the responsibilities and the power we may derive from the confidence of the public.

But, be that power more or less, we cannot admit that its purpose is to share the labours of statesmanship, or that it is bound by the same limitations, the same duties, the same liabilities as that of the Ministers of the Crown. The purposes and duties of the two powers are constantly separate, generally independent, sometimes diametrically opposite.

The dignity and the freedom of the Press are trammelled from the moment it accepts an ancillary position. To perform its duties with entire independence, and consequently with the utmost public advantage, the Press can enter into no close or binding alliances with the statesmen of the day, nor can it surrender its permanent interests to the convenience of the ephemeral power of any Government.

The first duty of the Press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation.

The statesman collects his information secretly and by secret means; he keeps back even the current intelligence of the day with ludicrous precautions, until diplomacy is beaten in the race with publicity.

The Press lives by disclosures; whatever passes into its keeping becomes a part of the knowledge and the history of our times; it is daily and forever appealing to the enlightened force of public opinion – anticipating if possible the march of events – standing upon the breach between the present and the future, and extending its survey to the horizon of the world.

The statesman’s duty is precisely the reverse. He cautiously guards from the public eye the information by which his actions and opinions are regulated; he reserves his judgment of passing events till the latest moment, and then he records it in obscure or conventional language…and he concentrates in his own transactions all that power which the Press seeks to diffuse over the world.

The duty of the one is to speak; of the other to be silent. The one deals mainly with rights and interests; the other with opinions and sentiments; the former is necessarily reserved, the latter essentially free.

It follows, therefore, from this contrast that the responsibilities of the two powers are as much at variance as their duties. For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are.

We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences – to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world…. If the public writer shares in any degree the influence of the statesman, he shares at least few of those personal objects which constitute so large a part of ordinary statesmanship.

Even the triumph of his opinions is not accompanied by the applause of a party or the success of a struggle for patronage and power. Those opinions which he has defined, and, so to speak, created, slip from him in the moment of their triumph, and take their stand among established truths.

The responsibility he really shares is more nearly akin to that of the economist or the lawyer whose province is not to frame a system of convenient application to the exigencies of the day but to investigate truth and to apply it on fixed principles to the affairs of the world.

The responsibility we acknowledge has therefore little in common with that of statesmen, for it is estimated by a totally different standard of rectitude and duty…. The Press owes its first duty to the national interests which it represents.