An early defense of press freedom was made by the poet John Milton in his 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica, written in response to the British Parliament’s passage of a law requiring the government to approve all books prior to publication. “Truth and understanding,” Milton argued, “are not such wares as to be monopoliz'd and traded in by tickets and statutes, and standards.” This sentiment appeared to win legal recognition on the other side of the Atlantic when in 1733 New York newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger, in a landmark jury trial, was acquitted of seditious libel on the grounds that the articles he printed, which were harshly critical of New York’s colonial governor, were nonetheless based on fact. Twenty-five years after the Freedom of the Press Act came into force in Sweden, the framers of the U.S. Constitution enshrined the same principle in the document’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or the press.”
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Topic: A Brief History of Press Freedom (Read 1324 times)