My journalism professor Dr. Schuchardt provided the following quote on our syllabus. It has followed me around for about 8 weeks now, and I'm finally beginning to understand its meaning.

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinion, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
The business of journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it., and what folly is this toasting an independent press?
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
- John Swinton, 1880

I've only recently begun to understand that this quote illuminates what we would call bias. I suppose I've seen this played out in my hometown newspaper, but I never thought about how it could affect me, should I choose print journalism someday. Dr. Schuchardt also got us in at the Chicago Tribune recently, and I noted that most of the quotes etched into the building centered around the connection between human liberties and a free press.

If the ideology behind a newspaper like the Tribune is that the existence of a free press equivocates the existence of true human liberties, but John Swinton asserts that there is no such thing as a free (independent) press, what does that say of human liberty?