Columns

Suffolk Closeup: Protecting the voices of freedom

KARL GROSSMAN
KARL GROSSMAN

This week marks the 280th anniversary of a landmark event in the history of a free press — the trial of John Peter Zenger — that occurred 100 miles west of Shelter Island on that other island of Manhattan.

In a two-day trial that began on August 4, 1735, Zenger, publisher of the New York-Weekly Journal, was found not guilty of seditious libel by a 12-member jury.

The charge was brought by a tyrannical colonial New York governor, William Cosby, who accused Zenger of printing “false, scandalous, malicious and seditious” articles. Zenger’s real crime? Bringing to light in the New York-Weekly Journal some shady machinations by Governor Cosby.

The publisher, who had been jailed for nine months, was represented by Andrew Hamilton, considered the foremost lawyer in the colonies. Hamilton took the case pro bono, riding to the rescue from Pennsylvania where he had been a former attorney-general. He confounded the prosecution by admitting that Zenger had published the offending material, but he took the position that what was in the paper was the truth.

On August 5, Hamilton addressed the jury in an eloquent summation, parts of which, as a professor of journalism, I read to my students every semester.

He said: “Men who injure and oppress the people under their administration provoke them to cry out and complain, and then make that very complaint the foundation for new oppressions and prosecutions … The question before the court and you, gentlemen of the jury, is not of small or private concern. It is not the cause of one poor printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying. No! It may in its consequence affect every free man that lives under a British government on the main of America … It is the best cause. It is the cause of liberty. And I make no doubt but your upright conduct this day will not only entitle you to the love and esteem of your fellow citizens, but every man who prefers freedom to a life of slavery will bless and honor you as men who have baffled the attempt of tyranny, and by an impartial and uncorrupt verdict have laid a noble foundation for securing to ourselves, our posterity, and our neighbors, that to which nature and the laws of our country have given us a right to liberty of both exposing and opposing arbitrary power, in these parts of the world at least, by speaking and writing truth.”

The jury, after a short deliberation, returned. Jury Foreman Thomas Hunt, asked by the court clerk for its verdict, declared, “Not guilty.”

As the New York Times editorialized 30 years ago on the 250th anniversary of the Zenger trial, it “turned common law on its head and established the freedom of our press. The Zenger case planted the seeds that flowered a half-century later in the First Amendment. It destroyed the pernicious doctrine that criticism of government is seditious even if true. And it showed how juries, backed by public opinion, can enlarge the spirit of the law.”

Author Gail Jarrow in her book, “The Trial of John Peter Zenger,” states: “It was fitting that the Bill of Rights was adopted by Congress in the same building where Zenger had been jailed and tried more than 50 years before.” The building is now Federal Hall National Memorial at 26 Wall Street. Tours are given by the National Park Service.

Professor Douglas Linder of the University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law has written that “no case in American history stands as a greater landmark on the road to protection for freedom of the press than the trial of a German immigrant printer named John Peter Zenger.”

Press freedom, unfortunately, is not the way of the world, but far from it. I point my students to the superb journal Index on Censorship, which, since 1972, has battled for free speech. It emphasizes how “we fight for free speech around the world, challenging censorship whenever and wherever it occurs.”

Index on Censorship, from its home in Great Britain, provides a rundown of actions around the globe limiting free expression — and in too many countries, totally suppressing it. Its informative website is indexoncensorship.org/.

Since Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press with moveable type nearly 600 years ago, there have been many in power threatened by people being able to communicate freely and they have worked zealously to prevent those voices from being heard.

Living here, on the East End, in the United States, we must never take for granted the blessings of a free press.

We still see, too often, Freedom of Information Act requests denied or a libel suit brought to chill exposure and assaults on free expression.

The Zenger trial was a very bright milestone on a continually difficult journey.