On adversaries and protection of liberty

First allow me to point out that Rod Blagojevich and Todd Stroger are both Democrats. For those of you who are convinced that the mainstream press is a tool of the Democratic Party, that observation ought at least provide cause for sober reflection.

But my purpose today is not to contradict stereotypes about the media. Rather, I'd like to explore some of the issues that go into developing an "adversarial press."

The term refers to a popular notion that the press strengthens its watchdog role if it approaches all reporting on government critically, perhaps even skeptically, and it has been in play since the earliest days of America's experiment with a free press. Thomas Jefferson, whom we in the press like to remember for his quote that "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter," also came to believe that "the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."

Two centuries later, Illinois' governor and Cook County's top administrator seem certain to agree with him on that point at least. Last week, confronted at a news conference he'd engineered to discuss inspections of gas pumps by questions about his relationship to disgraced political fundraiser Antoin Rezko, Blagojevich exploded. He said the press was not interested in discussing "what's important to people" and wanted to focus solely on "hysterical sensationalism."

Stroger used a similar logic as the basis for a policy forbidding department heads to discuss the work of their agencies unless an administration spokesperson is on hand.

Politicians, whatever their party, know that "controlling the message" is a key to their power. An adversarial press sees disrupting that control as a key to helping voters decide the real merits of a leader or candidate. The clash of those aims leads to frustration for politicians - and as in the cases of Blagojevich's outburst or Stroger's rules, an occasional good news story.

In this context, it will be interesting to watch the coming presidential campaign. Democrat Barack Obama has a reputation for being a darling of the media, but that view is fading as his popularity with voters has soared.

Virtually every story on Rezko, for example, makes reference to Rezko's fundraising for Obama and the real estate deal they made together. And just last week, Obama also found himself hustling to explain how he managed to get an especially attractive mortgage rate on his Chicago mansion.

Obama, furthermore, has been the target of vicious criticism on blogs and e-mail spam, which - whatever their flaws - have revitalized and decentralized political discussion into a system that is much more like the unashamedly partisan and diverse media of Jefferson's day than the objective and more monolithic model of the late 20th century.

No longer is freedom of the press just limited, in A.J. Liebling's phrase, to "the man who owns one." Now, practically everyone owns one and, as in the early days of the country, he or she can write and report from an overtly partisan point of view. With that as a backdrop, politicians like Blagojevich and Stroger may come to appreciate having a traditional "adversarial press" to bark at and try to control.

Jefferson also famously said that "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." If he's right in that comparison, the mainstream press, whatever you think about its political affiliations, may not be able to hold back a coming outbreak of new freedom.