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Fight For a Free Press Has Been a Battle
Of The Common Man
By M. TYUS BUTLER
With war and threat of war constantly at hand, each American becomes increasingly aware of the freedom he possesses in this, one of the few remaining countries where the theory of the equality of man still remains.
More than ever before, freedom is now, symbolically and literally, based on man’s right to print and publish what he desires, being limited primarily by the responsi^ bility for what he writes. The fight for freedom of the press is one in which all Americans can take pride because although only a few have played a major role in cementing this right, all citizens have given it .their approval. In periods when this freedom is in , danger, they add their voices to those of thq many editors, reporter^ and writers over the coun-v try in a swelling cry for guarantee of that freedom.
The colonists who came to this country did not bring with them any constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press, nor did that right come easy to the Americans (whose ideas of independence and freedom increased with the distance between them and the seat of government.
The first great impetus to freedom of the press in this country was given in the trihl of John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant who in 1733 started the New York Weekly Journal as an avowed opposition paper to the mouthpiece of the royal governor of the colony of New York. Supported by the common people of that colony, Zenger’s paper aroused the anger of the governing .body, and after the appearance of several strong articles on the usurpation of power by the governor, Zenger in November, 1734, was seized, throvfa -■ into jail, and charged with seditious libel.
This was the first recorded case of a newspaper started in America for the purpose of opposing a governing political group, although James Franklin, Benjamin’s brother, began his New England Courant in 1721 as a voice opposing the dominating religious body in the Bay colony.
The existing law pertaining to libel, as it was brought over from England, was that truth could not be used as a defense, nor could the jury determine any phase of the legal question involved in the trial. All the jury could do was to rule on whether Zenger was the person responsible for the publication of the articles claimed to have been seditious. The legal counsel which came to the support of the defendant was ruled ineligible to practice in the New York courts, so -t the last minute Andrew Hamilton, an 80-year-old Philadelphia lawyer, made the trip to New York to enter a plea to the jury which will always remain in the hoatory books of this coun
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