Statement by the President in honor of World Press Freedom Day

World Press Freedom Day is annually observed on May 3 to remind us all of the vital importance of this core freedom. It is a day in which we celebrate the indispensable role played by journalists in exposing abuses of power, while we sound the alarm about the growing number of journalists silenced by death or jail as they attempt to bring daily news to the public.

Although World Press Freedom Day has only been celebrated since 1993, its roots run deep in the international community. In 1948, as people across the globe emerged from the horrors of the Second World War, nations saw fit to enshrine in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights the fundamental principle that everyone "has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Even as the world recognizes the central and indisputable importance of press freedom, journalists find themselves in frequent peril. Since this day was first celebrated some sixteen years ago, 692 journalists have been killed. Only a third of those deaths were linked to the dangers of covering war; the majority of victims were local reporters covering topics such as crime, corruption, and national security in their home countries. Adding to this tragic figure are the hundreds more each year who face intimidation, censorship, and arbitrary arrest – guilty of nothing more than a passion for truth and a tenacious belief that a free society depends on an informed citizenry. In every corner of the globe, there are journalists in jail or being actively harassed: from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, Burma to Uzbekistan, Cuba to Eritrea. Emblematic examples of this distressing reality are figures like J.S. Tissainayagam in Sri Lanka, or Shi Tao and Hu Jia in China. We are also especially concerned about the citizens from our own country currently under detention abroad: individuals such as Roxana Saberi in Iran, and Euna Lee and Laura Ling in North Korea.

Today, I lend my voice of support and admiration to all those brave men and women of the press who labor to expose truth and enhance accountability around the world. In so doing, I recall the words of Thomas Jefferson: "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."

“press freedom” in America is being nullfied by the propagandistic media. freedom of the press is not freedom to propagandize. freedom of the press is not freedom to lie.
freedom of the press is not freedom to endanger America.
To the contrary, "freedom of . . . the press" is a right of the people to use money and technology to publish our own opinions without being censored by some "Ministry of Truth." Freedom of the press is freedom to do what Barak Obama considers "propagandizing." Recall the complaint by Bill Clinton that "there's no truth detector" to control what Clinton implied was propagandizing by Rush Limbaugh. The last time someone said, "I want freedom of the press to be the freedom not to be lied to," I wrote such a long response that I had to put it in the word processor and went into the "save early, save often" mode - which turned out to be a wonderful idea when a windstorm caused a power outage.
The Right to Know

I am still confused as to why there are no mainstream conservative newspapers if it is a lucrative business?

First of all, abb keeps posting threads labeled "Dinosaur Media Death Watch" to document the fact that, as Warren Buffet recently put it, " most newspapers in the United States . . . have the possibility of nearly unending losses . . . I do not see anything on the horizon that sees that erosion coming to an end."
But more to the point, journalism is inherently opposed to conservatism. Journalism is about novelty and curiousity, conservatism (to the limited extent that freedom-loving Americans can be called "conservative") is about caution. But that does not imply that "the freedom of . . . the press" intended opposition to American "conservatism," defined most aptly as conservation of the very Constitution of which the First Amendment is a part. The apparent contradiction is because journalism as we know it - monopolistic, inherently radical journalism:

is an artifact of the telegraph and the 1848 advent of the newswire, which homogenized the newspapers and made the editorial pages a sideshow instead of the main event which had been the case in the founding era.

claims to be "the press." Whereas

books and magazines have equal claim to that title, if title it be, and
no one would claim to be "speech," so why should anyone claim to be "the press?" "The freedom of . . . the press" is properly understood as the right of the people to use money and technology to publish (using any "useful art" the development of which the patent rights authorized by Article I Section 8 of the Constitution may "promote") whatever we want to.

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