Financial Express Newspaper

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Admin
Financial Express Newspaper

Financial Express Newspaper

The freedom of the press guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution is today generally assumed to prohibit any involvement of the government with newspapers. But for the first half century or so after independence, this was not the case. Government subsidies were provided to many publishers for the printing of newspapers, and to the post office for their delivery.

The Rationale for Government Support

The radical idea leading to the creation of the United States was that all governmental power was derived from “the consent of the governed.” The founders of the republic assumed that if the people were to govern themselves, they needed to be fully informed about the issues they faced. Therefore among the first freedoms guaranteed to them by the Constitution were the freedoms of speech and of the press. The importance of a free press was concisely stated by Thomas Jefferson in 1787: “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. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”