Celebrate freedom and attend to its cracks and fissures

Tomorrow will be a day to defy the summer heat at a local parade. It will be a day to hoist the children into thrill rides at a community festival. A day to grill brats and burgers and, especially, hot dogs at home. A day, of course, for fireworks shows.

And, it will be a day to contemplate — and appreciate — freedoms.

President Franklin Roosevelt famously delineated four of them — speech, worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. That collection changed the world for a time, though now, disputes about the sanctity of the latter two and about the applications of the first two have unsettled a once-firm foundation.

For my purposes, it is the first that occupies my thinking today, the freedom of speech — or more specifically, its subset freedom of the press.

The writer A.J. Liebling declared that this freedom, freedom of the press, is guaranteed “only to those who own one.” That was a pertinent observation in Liebling’s day — he died in 1963 — and for a few decades beyond. Today, every person with a home computer or pocket smartphone owns the equivalent of a printing press, indeed an improvement on it, with the ability to spew out instantaneously as much free speech as she or he likes to audiences in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands and more.

And we are living with uncomfortable consequences of all this unfettered liberty. Free speech, we see every day, is not always true speech. It is not always kind speech. It is sometimes intentionally hurtful speech.

So, in a time when we have the best access to the power of information in the history of humankind, we often are easily as ill-informed as ever, sometimes more so.

You will expect me to call your attention back to Liebling’s object, to newspapers, and to encourage your faith in us, and I will confess to a preference for a style of journalism, in print and online, that is more formal, more disciplined, if imperfectly so. But that is less my aim today than to urge you not just to appreciate all the freedom you have to employ your “press” in America, but to be cautious about accepting all the freedom others take advantage of to employ theirs.

Yes, I must lament the challenges facing my chosen profession amid the cacophony of cheap, convenient, comfortable voices wooing the public’s attention. And, I lament them not just for sentimental reasons. There is also a practical effect that is weakening our communities in ways that neither Roosevelt — who mastered the power of the broadcast press in his day — nor Liebling could have predicted. For, despite today’s abundance and variety of sources for information and commentary about the world and nation, the access to news about governments closer to home is declining steadily.

At one time, the press room at the Illinois Capitol was a hive of conversation, clatter and activity, as newspapers and wire services across the state operated bureaus to monitor the activities of lawmakers relevant to their home communities. Today, there is but the Capitol News Illinois agency, supported — thankfully — by the Illinois Press Association to provide regular reports on the most prominent activities of state government.

Even closer to home, newspaper staffs that once routinely monitored the most functionary and critical activities of local planning, library, park, municipal and school boards are cutting back coverage or fading away altogether. The 2024 report of the Local News Initiative of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism found that five of Illinois’ 102 counties have no source of local news at all. Forty have only one.

“This isn’t just a business problem. It’s a democracy problem, too,” states a report last year by the Illinois Local Journalism Task Force, established to survey the state of media availability in our communities.

“Studies have shown that communities lacking robust local journalism have lower levels of voter participation and higher levels of corruption. And, of course, misinformation flourishes. Less measurable but still important is the sense of community that local news fosters,” the report adds.

Fortunately, people who appreciate the value of local news have at least one ally in a Rockford lawmaker named Steve Stadelman. Stadelman, a Democratic state senator and former television broadcast news reporter, was the driving force behind the journalism task force, and he has produced numerous pieces of legislation intended to support local media outlets and get more reporters into their communities. He managed to get a bill passed in 2024 offering limited tax credits to qualified local providers, and he promises to keep up the pressure for more assistance. His work earned him a Legislative Service Award this year from the Illinois Press Association.

Such efforts and the forces that compel them are an important point of reflection on a day devoted to thoughts of freedom. Ironically, one of the undeniable cornerstones of the liberty we celebrate has developed cracks and fissures as it has expanded. May we devote some energy today, and all days, to how we can fill them in.