This week British Prime Minister Keir Starmer publicly ranted against “lies and misinformation” being spread by Elon Musk. The billionaire took to social media through X to post about the well-documented and notorious Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal. From the late 1980s to 2013, Pakistani-immigrant men groomed and abused working-class British girls, often but not always white. Police botched the investigations, in some cases going as far as to arrest fathers who tried to rescue their children, while not prosecuting the abusers. The scandal has been public knowledge among the British right and far-right for years, but Musk is one of the first world-famous celebrities to take up the cause, and he is certainly the first world figure with enough clout to force a response from the British government.

　　Starmer’s retreat to ranting is an attempt to stymie criticism and hopefully mitigate the damage from what has become a considerable political liability. The criticisms have mostly been leveled at the Labour Party of the Blair era, for mismanaging the law enforcement response and covering up the scandal’s scale. In fact, Labour governments have for some time tried to proscribe press freedoms in the name of getting the “the right” or “true” information to the public. Great Britain’s constitution is such that there is no press freedom outside the freedoms granted by parliament, and Britain’s dystopian-sounding Counter Disinformation Unit, or National Security and Online Information Team, operates without serious legal challenge. In the United States, the First Amendment supposedly precludes the American republic from replicating Britain’s disinformation board, but that did not keep the Biden administration and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas from creating what the Homeland Security department termed its “Disinformation Governance Board” in the spring of 2022. Conservative and libertarian Republicans in Congress raised enough public pressure to force Mayorkas to kill the board just a few months after it was announced, but even in the United States, government desire to control the press and public speech has reached new heights with the era of mass social media.

　　There have certainly been examples where the spread of conspiracy theories and false information has proved harmful—one thinks of the 2016 Pizzagate incident where a North Carolina man was imprisoned after firing a rifle at a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant he believed was hiding a pedophile ring. But the idea that governments are more trustworthy than the citizenry or the free press is specious, particularly in light of worldwide government mismanagement of the covid pandemic and how basic civil rights have been curtailed across the West by governments left, right, and center. In the United States, the press understood itself until very recently to be a check on state power and to hold state declarations accountable, not to be a vehicle for state-codified information.

　　The American republic’s executives and legislature largely understood that the press’s imperfections and speculations served a vital role in maintaining the energetic vigilance of a free democratic and democratic people’s natural rights. That the people and the press might sometimes be imprudent was not a reason to curtail press or speech freedoms or to subordinate them to state control. In 1795, President George Washington told Gouverneur Morris that in a government as free as the United States, “where the people are at liberty, and will express their sentiments oftentimes imprudently, and, for want of information, sometimes unjustly, allowances must be made occasional effervescences.” Washington, interestingly enough, did not use the occasion to complain about the press’s freedoms. A free press, he conceded, made occasional messes.

　　The messiness of the press prompted the first president not to make excuses for government intervention, or for government misinformation, but instead to make it clear that press and speech freedoms did not give the government license to ignore its own corruption. Washington called a free government that guaranteed free speech his “political creed” and told Morris that so long as he presided over the government, he would not suffer “any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity, or will give sanctions to any disorderly proceedings of its citizens.”

　　Washington made an important distinction between speech and “proceedings” that typified the free American republic’s response to public speech. Writing itself was not considered violent; a quick look at what was published in the Federalist Era about George Washington himself—partisans accused him of being an agent of Britain, and of selling the country to British commercial interests—is proof enough of that, as was the combative and contemptuous civil and political reaction to John Adams’ ham-fisted attempt to curtail the press freedoms Washington had sought to uphold. Riots could be prosecuted; newspaper articles could not be.

　　Americans in 2025 still have, and demand, superior independence in ways that modern Britons do not. We should be grateful for the First Amendment.

　　The American press’s very multiplicity of opinion in fact strengthened the liberties of the United States and guarded them from tyranny. Whatever minor—and they were in fact minor—occasional social upheavals that stemmed from a free press were small prices to pay for the maintenance of a free republic. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that Americans, far from seeing the press as a tool in maintaining the republican order, understood the press as a tool for its subtle changes in the political and social orders that kept revolution at bay. It was never the Americans’ intention, he wrote in Democracy in America, to find “a permanent state of things with elements which undergo daily modifications; and there is consequently nothing criminal in an attack upon the existing laws, provided it be not attended with a violent infraction of them.” Citizens of the United States were “moreover of opinion that courts of justice are unable to check the abuses of the press; and that as the subtilty of human language perpetually eludes the severity of judicial analysis, offences of this nature are apt to escape the hand which attempts to apprehend them.”

　　American government’s commitment to press freedoms has always been the most tenuous in wartime. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt in particular treated the press high-handedly with only cursory legal and political challenges, but they did so with the support of majorities in Congress. Others, like George W. Bush during the Iraq War, remained strikingly willing to allow the press to operate freely in wartime and in war zones. Still, though, even when the American government engaged in high-handed treatment of the press, they never posed as the ultimate arbiter of truth. What makes the approach of modern European governments different from time-honored American law is the idea that the government should oversee the press, rather than sometimes war with the press itself.

　　H. L. Menken once quipped that it was the right and duty of the press to commit lèse-majesté, to insult the government and to challenge its declarations. The American press has traditionally seen itself less as an instrument of policy, but more as the voice of a free people—at times in opposition to the federal government’s will and at times for it, but not subservient to it.

　　The traditional relationship between the press and government was put to the test in recent years, especially during the coronavirus epidemic. Instead of assuming its combative and oftentimes antagonistic posture towards state pronouncements, the mainstream media often accepted wholesale government talking points, with hardly any pushback. Media acting merely as a government information service kills the people’s belief in a free press, because instead of one institution being proved to be misleading—the government—the government and the press were now seen to be untrustworthy together.

　　The collusion between the press and the government did not happen overnight, of course. The seeds were laid in World War II, when government censorship and federal oversight of the press was justified in the name of national security. Before the 1940s, openly partisan media was the norm. The Chicago Tribune, for example, was famously a Republican newspaper. “Neutral” press was an impossibility, because the press, like the people it reflected, had political opinions the government honored through the First Amendment. The rise of television networks, and the ossification of the press’s relationship with the federal government, created the circumstances for an ostensibly free press to act like a de-facto state press during Covid. Misinformation has been, if anything, a free people reclaiming true press freedom over and against a state-managed press.

　　British historian and writer James Bryce wrote in his opus The American Commonwealth that while the American press might not be “above the moral level of the average good citizen,” it was undoubtedly above the moral level of the partisan and hyper-corrupt machine politics that defined urban centers of the United States during the Gilded Age. “Taking the American press all in all,” he wrote, “it seems to serve the expression … of public opinion” more than European presses did. The American reading public had a “superior independence” to the reading publics of Europe. The American reading public in 2025 still has, and demands, its superior independence in ways that modern Britons do not, and Americans should be grateful for the now over two centuries of political and social catechesis the First Amendment has offered.

　　Undoubtedly, the American press is an imperfect mess, and Elon Musk is almost certainly not on the moral level of the average good citizen. But the standard for the maintenance of the free press in the United States isn’t moral perfection, or even getting the “right” “information” to the public. The point of a free press is a free press, even if it is a complete mess.