“Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require too much an active energy …”

— Benjamin Franklin

What is a democracy?

Is it the simple act of the governed casting ballots to decide the future of its government?

Can you call it a democracy if those ballots were cast by an uninformed public? Or a public fed only the party line, information filtered and distilled by the very people seeking power?

Our founding fathers thought not.

The framers of our Constitution knew that, if we were going to have a government in which the power truly rested with the people, then the people must not be denied the greatest power of all: knowledge.

The founders forbid any abridgment of press freedoms so the people could publish criticisms of their government at will, so the faults of our government could be aired publicly and the people would know what needed fixing, so they could fix it at the ballot box.

Absent that, voting would be like buying a house and using the seller’s cousin as a home inspector, like buying a used car having talked only to the spurious salesman, like accepting a killer’s denial as proof that he’s innocent.

***

“Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Over coffee at Cabin Creek this week, Greg Awtry, the former Nebraska newspaper publisher turned Alpena News guest columnist, told me he and probably a lot of other people were tired of all-Trump-all-the-time TV news.

Probably, I said, but historians 100 years from now will be glad for all this coverage.

I understand the frustration. That’s why I, the junkiest of news and politics junkies, binge-watch “3rd Rock from the Sun” instead of C-SPAN when I come home from work at night.

But freedom of the press is not just about protecting an independent voice today, it’s about allowing an independent voice to speak into the future.

Stifling publication of free thought is how longtime dictators foster almost cult-like following among their people. If you’ve controlled the message for generations, your people will know only that you’ve always been good. So they’ll assume you’ll always be good.

An independent accounting of the present guarantees historians will have an independent record to review in the future.

Love him or hate him, there’s no denying President Donald Trump has upended both politics and governance — there’s no such thing as “conventional wisdom” in the Trump era — and that’s why journalists are covering it breathlessly.

***

“The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the suppression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is the best preservative of the whole.”

— John Peter Zenger

James Madison gets all the credit, but Zenger is the actual godfather of press freedoms.

He was a colonial newspaper publisher who criticized the royal governor of New York in print and went on trial for libel. With Andrew Hamilton as his defense counsel, Zenger won his case in 1735 by establishing a publication can’t be called libel if it’s true.

That case laid the groundwork for everything that came after, and established the press as an important player in governance and democracy.

That’s our past.

But where’s our future headed?

Awtry and I will discuss the answers to those questions — and yes, I think there’s more than one answer — at an Association of Lifelong Learners event on Monday at Alpena Community College.

We’ll talk at you for just a short while, going over some of the statistics on the current state of things. Then we’ll talk with you. We’ll ask you questions and answer yours.

The press is an important player in democracy, but you’re the biggest.

So we want to hear your thoughts.

“He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and non-fiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out.”

— Stephen King, “The Shining”

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-358-5686 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.