Media Literacy: Sarah Palin's July 4 remarks, democratized

After resigning the Alaska governorship last Friday, Sarah Palin posted this on Facebook on Saturday, July 4, Independence Day:

"The response in the main stream (sic) media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans . . . How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country."

Palin is wrong. The media IS the country, and the documentation for that is IN Washington, in the National Archives. Most ordinary Americans, including Sarah Palin, don't understand this, because they have never been taught, that they, the people themselves, are the authors of the media principles, and thus the source of all media, particularly journalism, or what Americans have always called a "free press." That connection is consistently revealed by media professionals seeking to define exactly what journalists do. In a 1987 speech, journalist Jeff Greenfield laid it down nicely: "The bedrock theory of the free press is that once society decides to invest ultimate power in the people, they must have access to the widest possible range of information."

Thus the source of the power of the press must be the power of the people, who can access their power through only one source, the power of the press. The natural, enduring strength of this circularity is acknowledged by the deliberations of the nation's founders. The place for their guarantee of a free press was not in the Constitution, which established the government, but right at the top, No. 1 in the Bill of Rights, which protected the governed. The press belongs not to the Constitution, but to the people, who created it. Here's how it happened:

After the 1734 Zenger verdict, which established truth as a defense against libel or sedition, the young American press was free to print anything it wanted to, as long as it was the truth. It meant the public had an unchecked access to the flow of any information they might want, or need. The free press after the Zenger verdict democratized information, and democratized power. This was an astonishing development, in an American colonial society already forming the thought that some truths are self-evident regarding the rights of men, and can only be obtained through the consent of the governed.

The stature of the newspaper as a landmark democratic institution became a daily factor in the American mood in the decades leading to revolution, war, and independence. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, acknowledged that stature early in 1787, just before the Constitutional Convention, when he wrote: "The basis of government 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."

When the framers were finished with their work in September of 1787, and offered it for ratification, you could read the Constitution all the way through, and not come across a word about newspapers, or "the press." Word of "the press" does not appear until the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and it is a famous Amendment, on display in the National Archives: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances."

Edited down to the scope of modern media, it reads: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press." Freedom of the press! Not a cornerstone of the Constitution? Just something thrown in out of left field, buried in an amendment? Where is the power in that?

There are three answers.

The first is in the Constitution itself. Making no mention of the press, or its freedom, the Constitution does nothing to create a free press.

The second answer is in the First Amendment. By including it there, we see it is clear that freedom of the press was in the minds of the Constitution's framers. When in the amendment they acknowledge its existence, after ignoring it in the Constitution, it must mean the framers understood that freedom of the press preceded the Constitution, and was as self-evident to them as, in another well-known Jeffersonian phrase, certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The third part of the answer is provided by the word "abridge." Defined by Webster, it means "to reduce in scope, extent, etc." This must mean that the framers saw a free press as so fundamental to a democratic society that it preceded any laws they could create, and that the laws they did create could never be used to reduce the scope of that freedom.

They gave the press permanent, vast – almost absolute – power and then placed that power in the hands of the people. They made the people the overseers of the republic. Why did they do that? What leap of faith was required?

We arrive at a point where it is useful to run history backwards. If you ran all the lines of United States of America history backwards, would they converge in the Constitution, or in freedom of the press? If, in Gutenberg's time, the Bible begat mass media, did, in Jefferson's time, mass media beget the Constitution? Are we really a nation of the opinion of the people? Eighty-seven years after Jefferson's quote, Abraham Lincoln spoke famously of a "new birth of freedom," of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, not perishing from the earth.

One hundred and forty-six years after Lincoln's quote, Sarah Palin speaks of media as "detached from the lives of ordinary Americans" and, "How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it's about country." Hers is simple ignorance, yes, but also simply dangerous, for a national leader to believe and say such things.