Free press = free country

COEUR d’ALENE — The press is the foundation of free speech and when it is attacked as vehemently as it has been over the past two years, it puts the country on shaky ground, a Constitutional scholar said Thursday at a library lecture series.

The press emboldens the free speech of average citizens by setting an example, and holding accountable people in power, David Adler told an audience of 160 Thursday evening at the Coeur d’Alene Library.

The Framers of the Constitution learned the principle of free speech and a free press from observation and education, and the founders based the principle of a free press on the works of Milton, and on the failings of English law, Adler said.

Adler, a constitutional law expert, has served as the Cecil D. Andrus Professor of Public Policy and director of the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University to James A. McClure Professor and Director of the James A. and Louise McClure Center for Public Policy Research at the University of Idaho. He has taught courses on the Constitution and the Supreme Court in the UI’s political science department and the College of Law and is the author of several books on the subject.

Thursday’s presentation titled, “Fake News and the Freedom of the Press,” was part of the library’s Adler lecture series, a regular library feature.

“I for one am angry when I hear demagoguery about the press,” Adler said. “When we lose the press … our democracy begins to collapse and that’s no exaggeration.”

Adler compared President Donald Trump’s attacks on the press with Richard Nixon’s criticism of the war reporting of major newspapers during the Vietnam war. Nixon requested the U.S. Supreme Court to reign in the press, Adler said, by asking to impose the doctrine of prior restraint, which hearkens back to English law and allows leadership to punish newspapers for criticizing the government.

“When Nixon sought to impose prior restraint it sent a great chill through the newspaper industry and across America,” Adler said. “It wasn’t just (an attack upon) the freedom of the press but the entire first amendment.”

The Supreme Court stymied the request, with Justice Hugo Black writing, “To find that the President has ‘inherent power’ to halt the publication of news...would wipe out the First Amendment and destroy the fundamental liberty and security of the very people the Government hopes to make ‘secure.’”

The ruling allowed the New York Times and Washington Post to publish the Pentagon Papers, Adler said.

The English poet John Milton, Adler said, was among writers of the 1600s who thwarted the British government by promoting free speech. In an address before Parliament Milton likened government censors to an oligarchy and called free speech a “flowery crop of knowledge.” Instead of printing his books outside of Britain to avoid having them censored by the government, Milton challenged the authorities because he so highly valued the freedom of expression and printing, Adler said.

The framers incorporated Milton’s ideas into the U.S. Constitution.

Adler said the president’s attacks on free speech coincide with those of oligarchs who chose to quell discourse at the expense of the freedom of the populace.

“An attack on the free press is an attack on democracy, and our right to know,” he said.

Adler’s lectures have aired on C-Span, and his interviews have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, National Review, Fox News and NPR. He was the recipient of the 2010 Idaho Humanities Council’s “Outstanding Achievement in the Humanities Award.”