To much fanfare this morning, the Washington Post rolled out a new slogan on its website: “Democracy dies in darkness.” And while that rolls nicely off the tongue like a Hallmark greeting card, there’s one problem. At least on this continent, democracy was born in darkness. Literally.
Two centuries ago, the American experiment in self-government got started behind closed doors and barred windows. It was a deliberate decision of the Constitutional Convention, one that would no doubt rub the Washington Post wrong.
Even in an era when news could only travel as fast as someone on horseback could carry it, the Framers feared that the endeavor would fall apart in the public eye. So before building a better union in Philadelphia, the delegates agreed to an opaque policy. The subsequent secrecy rule mandated that “nothing spoken in the House be printed or otherwise published, or communicated without leave.”
And for four months there wasn’t much on the record, or on background, or even on deep-deep background coming out of Independence Hall. Years later Harvard President Jared Sparks would throw some light on their reasoning.
Recounting a conversation with James Madison in 1830, Sparks explained that early opinions were “at first so crude that it was necessary they should long be debated before any uniform system of opinion could be formed.” In terms more familiar to journalists, the founders’ first drafts were embarrassing. Sparks continues:
Had the members committed themselves publicly at first, they would have afterwards supposed consistency required them to retain their ground, whereas by secret discussion, no man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and truth and was open to argument.
What would have happened if those colonial politicos yielded to the self-important muckrakers at the Washington Post? As Sparks tells it, “Mr. Madison thinks no Constitution would ever have been adopted by the Convention if the debates had been public.”
Obviously, transparency is important to representative democracy. Cognizant of this, the founding architects built the free press into the entire constitutional system with the First Amendment. Still, that doesn’t give journalists license to know absolutely everything.
As an industry, journalism produces the news, the product of several hundred decisions. When deciding what to file, good reporters make prudent decisions about sources, facts, and the good of the public. That standard is why we celebrate the Watergate story while damning BuzzFeed’s unverified dossier. And it’s what makes the Washington Post’s overwrought platitude such a poor guide.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
