The Press

I had noticed that, unlike the formal, publicly-funded institutions guaranteeing liberty like the judiciary, apart from the BBC, the press is not publicly-funded, is unofficial and, of course, therefore subject to financial winds and political influences. Nick Aragua , a newspaperman, finessed this very helpfully for me by making the distinction between public institutions guaranteeing liberty versus the press being an *expression* of that liberty. 

The ship of government floats in a sea of the eyes of the people all looking at it, perceiving it and scrutinising it. Some of them get together and ally the articulacy of the tongue and the pen (and a certain amount of courage) to the scrutiny of the eyes and the press comes about. These ‘organs’ of scrutiny and articulacy are still subject to financial winds and political influences though. The ability of the eyes to look and speak/write goes back to the birth of liberalism which must have started with things like the invention of the printing press in the 15th (?) century. As the pamphleteering and polemics rose in inverse proportion to the decline in the fear, mystique and aura of monarchy, until we reach the point where monarchy is literally decapitated in 1649 and the Puritan rebel, John Milton, writes Areopagetica, liberalism and ‘liberty’ in the modern sense is born. It became an element in which we presume to swim which we must not, however, take for granted.

The financial winds and political influences mean, presumably, that the pure, unfiltered expression of freedom doesn’t always happen. You need the right conditions in terms of reporter, editor and proprietor to coalesce at certain times for the ‘heroic’ function of the press to be fulfilled that occasionally raises it to the level of the august ‘fourth estate.’ Such moments occur against an mundane background of selling enough papers to survive.

Returning to the eyes, it’s interesting that one of the first organs of the press was called ‘The Spectator.’