Opinion
OPINION: The importance of a free press
Dear Editor,
In 1800, the United States—then a young nation of just over five million people—supported roughly 200 newspapers. That same year, London, the cultural and intellectual center of Britain, with a population of one million, had only four newspapers, proportionally just one-tenth of the American total. Only a few decades later, the United States boasted more than 2,500 newspapers serving 23 million readers.
A broad, independent press has always been essential to human freedom. When many voices compete, citizens gain a more honest understanding of the world. To see why, consider a grim hypothetical: imagine if, in the early 1800s, a conglomerate of slaveholders joined forces to create thousands of newspapers, using them to justify and defend slavery. They then used the money from these papers to buy out or put out of business other independent media sources, censuring all of them to create a fictional idea of the virtues of slavery. Fortunately, in our timeline, what really happened was that thousands of abolitionists risked their safety and spent their own money to expose slavery’s brutality through books, pamphlets, and newspapers—work which would have been impossible under a media monopoly.
Now consider a different scenario—one not hypothetical at all. Forty years ago, about 50 companies owned 90% of U.S. media. Today, just six corporations control that same share. Six companies determine what the vast majority of Americans read, watch, and hear. Some may soon merge, further concentrating power. If concentrated media power was alarming in the 1800s and would have been catastrophic, why should we shrug it off now?
We consume national news the way we watch sports or reality TV, cheering for “our side” and forgetting that the most important decisions, the ones that shape our daily lives, happen locally. What our schools teach, how our cities are planned, which roads are built or ignored: these issues rarely make cable news, but they define our communities, much more than what some senator in D.C. or a New York- based political pundit most recently tweeted. And without independent local media, they go uncovered, unnoticed, and unchallenged.
That is why an informed citizen must do more than scroll and skim.
Because a free press is not something a nation “has.” It is something its people support and maintain. And if we don’t invest in the diversity of voices that once made America the most literate, self-governing society on earth, we will wake up to find that six corporations, or possibly even fewer, now speak for 330 million of us.
A nation that forgets how to question power will learn what it’s like to live under it.
Jonathan White
Saratoga Springs
