Defend Press Freedom Quotes

You can't pick and choose which types of freedom you want to defend. You must defend all of it or be against all of it.

In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

If you truly hate censorship then you will defend anyone that is unfairly censored. Everyone deserves their legal rights, even when they disagree with us. Protecting their rights protects ours.

In 1960, The New York Times printed an advertisement titled “Heed Their Rising Voices” that attempted to raise money to defend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. against perjury charges in Alabama. Southern officials responded by going on the offensive and suing the newspaper. Public Safety Commissioner L. B. Sullivan and Governor Patterson claimed defamation. A local jury awarded them half a million dollars, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice—that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism.

Historically, American liberals have been idealists, pressing forward toward the goals of greater freedom, social equality, and more meaningful democracy. The articulate exposition of a liberal ideology was necessary to convert others to liberal ideas and to reform existing institutions continuously along liberal lines. Today, however, the greatest need is not so much the creation of more liberal institutions as the successful defense of those which already exist. This defense requires American liberals to lay aside their liberal ideology and to accept the values of conservatism for the duration of the threat. Only by surrendering their liberal ideas for the present can liberals successfully defend their liberal institutions for the future. Liberals should not fear this change. Is a liberal any less liberal because he adjusts his thinking so as to defend most effectively the most liberal institutions in the world? To continue to expound the philosophy of liberalism simply gives the enemy a weapon with which to attack the society of liberalism. The defense of American institutions requires a conscious articulate conservatism which can spring only from liberals deeply concerned with the preservation of those institutions. As Boorstin, Niebuhr, and others have pointed out, the American political genius is manifest not in our ideas but in our institutions. The stimulus to conservatism comes not from the outworn creeds of third-rate thinkers but from the successful performance of first-rate institutions. … Conservatism does not ask ultimate questions and hence does not give final answers. But it does remind men of the institutional prerequisites of social order. And when these prerequisites are threatened, conservatism is not only appropriate, it is essential. In preserving the achievements of American liberalism, American liberals have no recourse but to turn to conservatism. For them especially, conservative ideology has a place in America today.

If this past election and our present political, social, and environmental upheavals have done nothing else, they have inspired a new generation of thinkers. From poets to activists to journalists to scholars, the raw and gritty realities we face as a nation and as global citizens are being exposed, dissected, and examined. Freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and the right to peacefully protest are not the luxuries of a free society, they are the defenders,supporters, and protectors of a free society. They are what make a free society possible. The solutions to our problems will no doubt be lengthy, complex, and difficult, but a generation awakened from the lethal sleep of apathy is a beginning. And that offers true hope for our future.

The free market system of capitalism enhances freedom in three ways. Traditionally freedom of exchange has been seen as a basic form of individual freedom, with which it would be wrong to interfere, and in this sense is a basic, negative freedom like the freedom of speech, assembly, the press, or conscience. Gerald Gaus, a liberal defender of the morality of markets, summarizes the liberal case for freedom in capitalism: “classical liberalism embraces market relations because (but not, of course, only because) they (1) are essentially free, (2) respect the actual choices of individuals, and (3) legitimately express different individuals’ rational decisions about the proper choice between competing ends, goods, and values.”98 Market freedom is necessary to respect individuals as free choosers and designers of their own “experiments in living,” as Mill famously puts it.99 Free markets also have positive aspects, however, in providing opportunities by increasing persons’ material wealth in order to choose things that they value. Another aspect of the positive freedom that markets promote is the freedom of persons to develop their autonomy as decision makers, and to find opportunities to escape from oppressive traditional roles. Markets also promote a third, more controversial, sense of freedom in that they allow persons to interact in mutually beneficial ways even when they do not know each other or have any other traditional reason to care about the other. I call this sense of freedom “social freedom.” In each of these ways – negative, positive, and social – markets have much, and in some cases even more, to offer to women, as women have been more confined by traditional roles to a constrained family life, deprived of a fair distribution of benefits and burdens of family life, and treated as second-class citizens in their communities. While capitalism has already, as we have seen, brought great advances in the realm of negative and positive liberties, capitalism’s ability to destruct the old and create new forms of community offer a vision of freedom that is yet to be fulfilled.

The Hudson Institute study found that religious liberty is powerfully associated with civil and political liberty, press freedom, economic freedom, and prolonged democracy.

Like a thespian, Churchill began to receive critical notices. When he rose from the front bench to address the House of Commons, Beverly Baxter, MP and a writer for the Beaverbrook press, compared him to 'the old bandit who had been the terror of the mountain passes . . . the fire in him was burning low. His head thrust forward characteristically, like a bull watching for the matador. He squared his shoulders a couple of times as if to make sure that his hands were free for the gestures that might come.' When Winston told BBC listeners that 'Now we have begun; now we are going on; now with the help of God, and the conviction that we are the defenders of civilisation and freedom, we are going on, and we are going on to the end,' Virginia Cowles wrote that he was 'giving the people of Britain the firm clear lead' they needed and 'had not found elsewhere.

It was no less important to defend the civilized order against the popular enemy at home. Force must be used to prevent “the leaders of Bolshevism and anarchy” from trying to “organize or preach against government in the United States,” Lansing explained. The Wilson administration recognized the threat and launched the most severe repression in US history, which successfully undermined democratic politics, unions, freedom of the press, and independent thought, as usual, with the general approval of the media and elites, all in self-defense against the ignorant rabble. Much the same story was reenacted after World War II under the pretext of a communist threat, and a few years later once again as the civil rights movement and other miscreants threatened properly functioning democracy,

Many promised to sail with us today but did not come. Some, by circumstance could not. Do not hold their absence against them. Others who spoke bravely are absent but without cause. They are cowards and hypocrites and we are better off without them. We, however, are here. We stand together of our own free will. We were neither bribed nor pressed into service. We are a free people defending our freedom and the freedom of our families. That is the source of our authority and strength.

As the most powerful defender of freedom on earth, we find ourselves unable to escape the responsibilities of freedom, and yet unable to exercise it without restraints imposed by the very freedoms we seek to protect. We cannot, as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises. We cannot, under the scrutiny of a free press and public, tell different stories to different audiences, foreign and domestic, friendly and hostile.16

The essential factor, in my view, was the corruption of the mainstream news media beginning around the turn of the century. By the end of the Obama years, the problem had gone far beyond bias or even political hackery; it had become corruption. The great preponderance of media managers, editors, commentators, and reporters were simply unwilling to defend American constitutional ideals, very much including the First Amendment’s guarantees of speech and press freedoms, in order to coddle a movement of progressive zealots.

Resistance, as an American credo, blossomed from the seed-time of our American Revolution as a universal right, not simply some random act to “disrupt civil order and stability” or fleeting moments of dissent or vague calls for freedom, as often defined. Resistance, over the centuries, has endowed a “public commons” for “we the people” to have a voice in framing the defining issues in our most trying times. And while those defining issues have remained unresolved, in many respects— expanding the protection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all; defending the right of free speech and freedom of the press as inalienable—they have taken new forms in an age of nuclear weapons and climate change.