The Washington Examiner calls it "farcical" that the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders organization ranks the United States dead last among the G7 nations on its annual World Press Freedom Index. Perhaps the ranking is unfair. I am in no position to audit every methodology the organization applies — that would require firsthand knowledge of events and institutions well beyond my own century. But I will say this: the argument matters enormously, and the Examiner is right to engage it rather than wave it away.

I spent a good portion of my working life at a printing press. Paper, ink, and the free circulation of ideas were not merely my livelihood — they were, as I saw it, the bloodstream of self-government. A printer who cannot print freely, or a reader who cannot read freely, is a citizen whose franchise has already been quietly confiscated. The post road and the press worked in tandem: one moved goods and letters, the other moved argument and accountability. Weaken either and you weaken the Republic.

The Examiner's lead implies that the Index is shaped, at least in part, by political calculation from a foreign body — which is itself a legitimate concern worth examining. A measurement tool that carries bias is a broken instrument, and a broken instrument gives bad readings. But here is where I would caution the Examiner's readers not to let the critique of the measuring tool become a reason to stop measuring. The question "how free is our press today compared to last year?" deserves a rigorous answer, whoever is asking it.

What I would ask, as one who understood the economics of the printing trade, is the household-level question: Can a working journalist afford to publish an inconvenient truth without losing her livelihood, her access, or her liberty? That is not a question about abstract constitutional text — it is a question about the practical daily cost of honest reporting. Legal protection matters; so does the financial independence of the institutions doing the reporting, and so does the culture of tolerance for dissent in the halls of power.

I will not pretend to know whether America's press is freer or less free than it was a decade ago — that inference lies beyond the dossier in front of me. What I know is this: complacency is the enemy. The moment a republic declares itself beyond criticism on the question of press freedom, it has taken the first step toward deserving that criticism. My counsel to any working reader: subscribe to at least one publication that regularly makes you uncomfortable. It is, I promise you, the cheapest form of civic insurance available.