Who guards the guardians of the press?

I confess that, in my own time, I said some harsh things about the newspapers. I once remarked — and I do not wholly retract it — that a man who reads nothing at all is better educated than one who reads nothing but newspapers. Yet I never doubted, not for a single season of my public life, that a free press, however reckless and partisan, was more friend than enemy to liberty. The reason is simple: a people who cannot learn what their government does cannot hold it to account, and a republic without accountability is monarchy wearing a disguise.

The Washington Examiner reports that the Committee to Protect Journalists — an institution whose very purpose is to defend reporters who face violence, imprisonment, or state coercion — has voted to decline the exclusion from its protected list of individuals embedded with militant organizations or carried by state-sponsored media. I have not read the committee's full deliberations, and I will not pretend to; what the headline and lead give me is enough to identify the civic shape of the problem.

The difficulty is this: the word journalist is not a magic talisman that confers immunity from scrutiny. A propagandist in the service of a government, or a courier embedded with a militant force, is not performing the function that makes the press valuable to a free society. The press earns its privileged standing — its near-inviolability under any sound constitution — precisely because it is independent: of government, of faction, of the armies in the field. The moment that independence is abandoned, the claim to protection under the journalist's mantle becomes, at best, confused, and at worst, a fraud upon the public.

I would not have such institutions police opinion. Heaven forbid. Diversity of viewpoint, even sharp and partisan viewpoint, is the lifeblood of a free press; I always said that errors of opinion may be safely tolerated where reason is left free to combat them. But there is a difference between combative opinion and institutional capture — between a reporter whose politics I despise and a functionary whose copy is written in a ministry or dictated at gunpoint by a faction. The Committee's failure, if the Examiner's account is accurate (and I mark that as inference, since I have only the lead before me), is not a failure of tolerance. It is a failure of definition — and institutions that cannot define their own purpose eventually lose the authority to serve it.

The deeper lesson, as I read it, applies beyond journalism. Every institution that exists to protect a public good — a court, a central bank, a licensing body, a professional association — is perpetually at risk of capture by the very interests it was built to discipline or defend. This is not cynicism; it is the most reliable observation of history. Power, left to consolidate, consolidates. And when the guardians cannot say plainly what they are guarding, the thing they guard is already in danger.

The remedy, as always, is an alert and educated citizenry — readers who do not simply receive information but who interrogate it, who ask who is speaking and in whose service, who understand that the free press is a function more than a title. Let the Committee find its nerve, define its terms, and make its standards legible to the public it serves. And let the public, for its part, keep a watchful eye even on those whose task is to keep a watchful eye. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — who will guard the guardians themselves? In a republic, the only honest answer is: all of us.