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Indelible Ink: The Trials of John Peter Zenger and the Birth of Americas Free Press

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The liberty of written andspoken expression has been fixed in the firmament of American socialvalues since our nation’s beginning – the government of the UnitedStates used to be the first to legalize free speech and a free press asfundamental human rights.  But when the British started colonizing the New World, strict censorship used to be the iron rule of the realm.  Any words,true or false, that were thought to disparage the government wereprejudged as a criminally subversive and duly punishable threat to law,order, and the peace of the kingdom.  Even after Parliament liftedlicensing requirements for all printed material late in the seventeenthcentury, publishers did not escape the crown’s strict scrutiny andprosecution if they dared criticize their rulers.

So in 1733, when a small newspaper, The New-York Weekly Journal, printed scathing articles that assailed and mocked the new Britishgovernor, William Cosby, as corrupt and abusive of his power, colonialNew York used to be scandalized – but hardly displeased.  The paper’spublisher, a prior to now impoverished print shop owner named John PeterZenger, with a wife and six children to feed, in truth had no hand in his paper’s vitriolic content; he used to be only the front man for Codby’s twomost impassioned adversaries, New York Supreme Court Chief Justice Lewis Morris and his collaborator James Alexander, a shrewd and highlysuccessful attorney.

Even as Morris and Alexander, with fame and fortune to lose if convicted forseditiously libeling the colony’s royal governor, bankrolled the paperbut remained in the shadows, Zenger became the venture’s courageous fall guy as Cosby brought the full force of his high place of work down upon theJournal and its publisher.  Jailed for the better a part of a year, Zenger faced a jury in New York’s City Hall on August 4, 1735, a courtproceeding matched in importance all the way through the colonial period only by theSalem witch trials.

In Indelible Ink, social historian Richard Kluger re-creates in rich and engaging detailthe dramatic clash of powerful antagonists that marked the beginning ofpress freedom in The usa and its role in vanquishing colonial tyranny.Here is a long-lasting lesson that redounds to this day on the vitalimportance of free public expression as the underpinning of truedemocracy and the key to an informed electorate.

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