This is the best time of the year to be here, right? The week we invite friends so we can show off Marblehead at its finest. The Festival of Arts, the Harbor Illumination, the concerts at Crocker Park and the fireworks are Marblehead’s annual rites of summer. This year, the celebration carries an extra charge. The Festival turns 60 and the country turns 250 the same week, a fitting double celebration.
Marblehead rightly stands proud of its place in the Revolution. The Marbleheaders of Glover’s Regiment, fishermen and sailors — used to crewing with all sorts — rowed Washington’s army to safety across the Delaware and pulled them off Long Island when the war could have ended right there. Regular people, sustaining the cause. The Revolution wasn’t only muskets and oars. It was a bet that ordinary people could govern themselves, if they had the right information to make decisions and could keep a close eye on those they put in power.
That’s why freedom of the press is in the First Amendment and not somewhere lower on the list. Marblehead had a hand in that part, too. Elbridge Gerry refused to sign the Constitution because it lacked protections for the people, a push that helped produce the Bill of Rights two years later.
The founders argued plenty about what those protections should be. Few believed in those protections more fiercely than Thomas Jefferson. In 1787, he wrote, “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.”
Admittedly, we’re a little biased toward that particular freedom. Which is why we’ve watched this past year with a knot in our stomach. Jefferson wanted a press the government couldn’t (and wouldn’t) lay a hand on. What we’ve seen is the opposite. The president sued CBS over an interview he didn’t like. Its parent company, needing federal approval for an $8 billion merger, paid $16 million to make the suit disappear.
The nation’s top broadcast regulator floated reviving an old rule to police late-night comedy. Soon after, CBS quietly shelved a Stephen Colbert interview with a candidate for office. Follow that chain, and it runs one way, from the government, through the agency that licenses the airwaves and into the newsroom.
Then the network cancelled Colbert outright, calling it a budget decision, days after he criticized that settlement and with the merger still pending. The president posted his congratulations.
At “60 Minutes,” the broadcast that made its name on independence, new ownership brought in leadership that veteran correspondents say tried to soften or kill vetted, fact-checked reporting. Three of them walked out, warning that the wall between the newsroom and the people signing the checks was being dismantled piece by piece. The company denies any political motive.
This is the exact danger the founders feared. They wrote the press into the First Amendment because they had lived under a government that decided what people were allowed to read. A free press stops being free the moment those in power can switch off the stories they would rather you not see.
Jefferson knew the danger, which is why he didn’t stop at wanting newspapers to exist. He wanted them in every hand “capable of reading them,” reaching what he called the whole mass of the people. He put the people in the center of that. A free press isn’t the property of the publishers. It belongs to everyone. When a president can sue a network into silence or a regulator can lean on what gets aired, the thing being taken isn’t theirs. It’s yours: the ability to know what those in power are doing and to judge it for yourself.
None of that should keep anyone from enjoying this time. Just the opposite! Enjoy every minute of it. Go see the artists and listen to the music and watch the fireworks. Invite your friends. Show off the town.
But also remember you’re celebrating more than a birthday. You’re celebrating the 250-year-old idea that government power should be derived from the consent of the governed — and that there should be a press to watch over it, openly and without interference.
The Marbleheaders who rowed Washington across the Delaware did their part. Our part is to keep paying attention and to keep showing up. What we have is beautiful and worth fighting for.
