Around a year before the Declaration of Independence was signed, John Adams penned words that he intended for his own time, but which eerily and prophetically describe our own. In his famous “Novanglus” essays (released as newspaper editorials), he wrote the following:

“There is nothing in this world so excellent that it may not be abused. … License of the press is no proof of liberty. When a people is corrupted, the press may be made an engine to complete their ruin: and it is now notorious that the ministry [the British government] are daily employing it to increase and establish corruption, and to pluck up virtue by the roots.”

So Adams was accusing the media of his day of not carrying out its function to properly inform and educate the people, but of completing the ruin of their liberties? He was accusing the media of plucking up virtue “by…