“The basis of our government 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.”

Thomas Jefferson

1743-1826

Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington

January 16, 1787

With yesterday’s revelation that Donald Trump’s Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr secretly sought and obtained phone and email records for professional and private accounts from journalists at CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post in a move to aggressively target news outlets in leak investigations, the words of Thomas Jefferson remind us to hold our government to account.

We fear that this unprecedented effort will have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of all Americans to a free press.

The Publishers

(source: “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations”)