Editor's note: With this editorial, The Dallas Morning News joins more than 200 newspapers across the country that are publishing editorials today on the importance of the First Amendment.
As a candidate and as president of the United States, Donald Trump has waged an unprecedented war of words on the media. He calls the press “amazingly dishonest” and major media outlets such as CNN and The New York Times “fake news.”
If the president sees inaccurate reporting, he should and has the right to call it out and draw attention to the facts. We won’t pretend that every story that has appeared in all of the various outlets that cover the presidency has been without fault. But we also won’t pretend that there isn’t a larger issue at stake here involving a free inquiry by a free press that gets to the very foundation of our republic.
Our Founding Fathers well understood that one effective way to squelch our liberty would be to silence those who — through handbills, printing presses and now digital media — work to hold the powerful accountable by opening to public scrutiny facts about how our society is governed.
As a result, they gave us the First Amendment with the expectation that a free press would arm citizens with facts and that the media would be held accountable by readers (and now a viewing public).
It is no coincidence that this newspaper's best work since its founding in 1885 has been produced by journalists who dared, in one way or another, to shine a light on societal injustices, corruption, the ravages of war, poverty and natural disasters while adhering to bedrock principles of truth and fairness.
As Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in his concurring opinion in the landmark 1971 Pentagon Papers case, New York Times Co. vs. United States, “In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.”
Trump is, of course, not the first U.S. president to voice his grievances with the media. Presidents from John Adams to Richard Nixon to Barack Obama often scuffled with the press corps.
But in our modern era, no president has as publicly or fundamentally challenged the legitimacy of America’s leading news organizations as the current occupant of the Oval Office. The crucial difference is that rather than taking issue with one story or even a series of stories, the intention seems to be to undermine the credibility of the press as a whole with a large swath of the citizenry.
We see this as dangerous for the simple reason that by diminishing the press, those who hold high office gain a greater ability to govern without the steadying force of public scrutiny. That’s a recipe not for empowering this president, but rather for ensuring that our leaders in Washington fall out of touch with the people and decide that they know better than the people they seek to govern.
Like with so many things, the founding generation dealt with this reality. Alexander Hamilton, a founder of the first order, believed the First Amendment was not necessary and argued against “a declaration that ‘the liberty of the press shall be inviolably preserved.’”
But in the end, James Madison and others insisted on adding a bill of rights to the Constitution — to protect the human rights of individuals against the whims of politicians, be it in 1791 or 1971 or 2018.
What followed through the course of our history has been a grand debate about how far the First Amendment should stretch. And, as with so many facets of our system, where it has settled is decidedly on the side of free and open speech. Even in critical moments, such as with the Pentagon Papers, our system has rejected prior restraint of speech.
As attorney Floyd Abrams, who argued the Pentagon Papers case, told us recently: “The First Amendment is most essential when our leaders are most hostile to freedom of expression.”
Today, more than 200 years after the First Amendment was ratified, we urge all Americans — regardless of creed, color or political affiliation — to stand up for their First Amendment rights, and to recognize how a free press is fundamental to the continuation of our American experiment in democracy.
At the same time, we should acknowledge that the U.S. serves as a beacon, even in these uncertain times, for freedom in the world. Last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the number of journalists imprisoned worldwide hit an all-time high of 262.
The fact that none were jailed in the U.S. is testament to the enduring genius of our Bill of Rights. As Abrams recently reminded this newspaper, “We would be far less protected if Hamilton and his allies had prevailed and we had a Constitution with no Bill of Rights.”
Indeed, the “fact that the First Amendment is in writing,” Abrams continued, “that it has been understood from the very beginning to be not a mere aspirational statement but a legal limitation on the government, and that it has become viewed as the centerpiece of the Constitution, provides us all with infinitely more protection against any president who is tempted to strip us of our freedoms.”
