Unfreedom of the Press

To make his case, Levin goes back to the beginning — and the beginning, in his telling, is refreshingly unashamed. The press that helped make the American Revolution was not neutral and never claimed to be. It was a patriot press, openly committed to a cause. Pamphlets, broadsides and newspapers argued the case for independence, promoted the principles that would run through the Declaration and later the Constitution, and made no secret of which side they were on. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which sold in enormous numbers relative to the colonial population, was not reportage. It was argument, and everyone understood it as argument.

This matters to Levin because it establishes his baseline: a press with a declared allegiance is not a corruption of the American tradition but its founding form. The men who wrote the First Amendment had lived alongside this press. They protected it knowing full well it was partisan, contentious and often vicious. Freedom of the press, in that original setting, meant freedom to take a side loudly and in public — not a promise to stand above all sides.

The turn, in Levin's history, arrives with the twentieth century. The idea that the press should be objective — that reporting could and should be scrubbed of the reporter's own commitments — did not descend from the founders. It surfaced, he argues, around the start of the Progressive Era, as journalism began to reimagine itself as a profession with standards, methods and something like a scientific claim to neutrality. Reporting was to become fact-gathering; opinion would be quarantined on its own page. The newspaper would speak, at last, from nowhere in particular.

Levin treats this shift with deep suspicion, and he draws on the era's own critics to do it. Walter Lippmann, writing in the 1920s, worried that citizens formed their picture of the world from a press that inevitably selected, framed and simplified — that what reached the public was less reality than a manageable version of it. Levin reads this not as an argument for better objectivity but as evidence that pure objectivity was never available in the first place. Someone always chooses which facts count. The choice is where the worldview enters, and no professional code erases the chooser.

Step back from the historical march and Levin's book is really making a claim about the whole notion of a neutral press. His argument is not that today's journalists are unusually dishonest people. It is that they inherited a professional myth — objectivity — that lets an entire class of like-minded professionals believe their shared worldview is simply the truth. When almost everyone in the room already agrees, group-think stops feeling like bias and starts feeling like consensus reality. The myth doesn't correct for that; it certifies it.

So the modern press, in his description, has become a party-press in fact while denying it in name. He argues it aligns overwhelmingly with a single political ideology, generally the progressive left, and then commits what he calls a massive untruth about its own nature by insisting it is neutral. This is the hypocrisy the whole book circles: not the taking of sides, which the founders would have recognized, but the taking of sides while wearing the costume of no side at all. The costume is what makes it dangerous.

Levin's journey ends where it began, inside the newsroom rather than outside it. The First Amendment, in his reading, still stands untouched; no government has laid a hand on the American press. The unfreedom he diagnoses is self-inflicted — a trade of independence for allegiance, made quietly and then denied. From the patriot pamphleteers to the openly factional papers of the early Republic to the professionalized, objectivity-claiming press of the twentieth century, he tracks one thing: the moment the trade's honesty about its own bias went missing, and bias learned to travel undeclared.