Bill Keller, Executive Editor of The New York Times, recently spoke about the state of journalism. While his attitude is refreshing and his thoughts are generally on target, I do have a few nits to pick:
Keller, when he speaks of the founders’ view of “the press” elides the fact that the conception of “the press” at the time of the writing of the Constitution and (more significantly) the Bill of Rights was quite different from what it is now. There was no profession associated with “the press,” for one thing—“the press,” in the sense meant by the founders, was an entity of politics, not of news gathering and dispassionate analysis.
In writing that the press should be seen as “supplying citizens with the information to judge whether they are being well served by their government,” Keller ignores the absolutely partisan nature of the press in the early years of the Republic. He says he spends his time explaining “why the founding fathers entrusted someone like me with the right to defy the president.” Thing is, they didn’t. Cloaking himself in the mantle of the founding fathers is a disservice to history and, I believe, to the press of today.
