As historian David Kennedy responded to remarks by David Remnick at Stanford recently, he cited the famous quote by Thomas Jefferson that most journalists know by heart:
The basis of our governments 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.
But then Kennedy continued the quote — an addition that I don’t recall ever having heard, and one that struck me as terribly important to recall today: “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”
When Jefferson wrote these words to Edward Carrington in 1787, he could hardly have imagined the mindset of so many publishers today — not wishing that “every man should receive” his papers, but ceasing delivery to any reader of little interest to advertisers.
