The Press and Freedom, a 1965 Free World supplement quoting Justice Goldberg

The Press and Freedom is an English U.S. Information Agency sheet for Manila, catalog date 9 March 1965, printed as a supplement to Free World. Over a collage of American newspaper front pages it quotes Justice A. Goldberg to newspaper editors: there is no free government without a free press, and no free press without a free government (NAID 6949246).

What it prints

The background is a wall of American newspapers. The archive reads the mastheads of the New York Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, the Chicago Daily News, The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times, and a few headlines through the overprinting. In front of them sit the heading, a quotation, and two captions for the photographs.

THE PRESS AND FREEDOM

U.S. Supreme Court Justice A. Goldberg before the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

We cannot have a free government without a free press and we cannot have a free press without a free government. Our Constitution has made the press free; you have it in your charge to make it responsible. It is for you to demonstrate that press freedom and responsibility are viable and indivisible concepts.

PRESS CONFERENCE—a clear recognition of peoples' right to inquire into governmental work

FREE FLOW OF INFORMATION—through books and periodicals, the press, radio and television networks

[...]

SUPPLEMENT TO FREE WORLD

VOL. XIV NO. 2 FEBRUARY

The photographs, as the archive describes them, show a press conference, election-night returns, a woman reading books, and two men reading a newspaper at a press.

Issuer and record

The sheet is filed in the National Archives series of posters the U.S. Information Agency distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, with a catalog date of 9 March 1965. Its own imprint names only the magazine, Free World, volume XIV, number 2. FRAME codes the audience as a foreign public and the purpose as persuading or winning support, and its source category is "Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure."

Reading it

FRAME tags testimonial and transfer. A named justice speaks for the argument, and the stack of real mastheads stands in for the press he describes.

The argument rests on the First Amendment. The Constitution does make the press free, and Goldberg put the burden of responsibility on editors rather than on officials. The caption on the press conference says citizens have a right "to inquire into governmental work," which is the right a free press exists to exercise.

The sheet falls short of its own standard in one place. It asks foreign readers to value a free flow of information while its imprint names a magazine and not the government agency that distributed it. A reader who took Goldberg's advice and inquired into the governmental work behind this poster would have found no agency's name on it to start with.

A Free World supplement dated January 1965, A New Quest for Union, is built on a photograph of President Johnson before Congress. The USIA hub asks of every sheet whether the reader knows who is talking, and the gallery holds the wider set.