nothing new under the sun.
"The most effectual engines for pacifying a nation are the public papers... A government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invent and put into the papers, whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --*
Thomas Jefferson*to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785.
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"Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it." --Thomas Jeffersonto John Jay, 1786.
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"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807*
"Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization" -*George Bernard Shaw*
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