Whatever Happened to Press Freedom and Free Speech? Nick Gillespie at Newseum on Wed

Attention, D.C. residents! On
Wednesday, I’ll be part of a great program at The Newseum being put
on by the great Brit site Spiked. Tickets are free and all are
welcome!

Details:

Across the Western world, it is no longer just governments that
see a free and rowdy press as a bad thing. So, increasingly, do
many ostensibly liberal campaigners, and even many writers and
journalists. There are many new threats to press freedom; not only
laws, but also conformism, pressure from reformers, and a tendency
to blame tabloid media in particular for every social and
intellectual ill of our age. The modern, democratic West was born
from the efforts of people who believed passionately in a free
press – from England’s Levellers to America’s founding fathers to
Europe’s men of the Enlightenment – yet today, it is often the
upper echelons of Western intellectual society who feel most
uncomfortable with the ideal of a free press.

Why has press freedom fallen so far out of favour? Why are some
people so riled by the existence of muck‐raking, trouble-causing
papers and other outlets, when that is the very business hacks have
been involved in for centuries? If the modern West sprung from a
renewed belief in freedom – including, crucially, press freedom –
does today’s discomfort with a free press tell us something about
the corrosion of Western values more broadly? Can we recover the
Jeffersonian view of press freedom being essential to democracy and
stability?