In describing his relationship with the press, Thomas Jefferson said that he had been ‘used as the property of the newspapers, a fair mark for every man’s dirt’. Yet the third President of the United States was also a zealous champion of press freedom. ‘Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government,’ he wrote in 1787, ‘I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.’
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