Most voters take for granted that a certain percentage of our elected officials are susceptible to corruption. This is a view we have in common with the Framers of the Constitution, who well understood the temptation political power holds for avaricious politicians. Consequently, most of them would have found the bribery indictment of a New Jersey senator unsurprising and only mildly interesting. They would, however, have been alarmed by the obvious attempt by the corporate media to use the Menendez story to distract public attention from a far more dangerous influence peddling scandal involving the President of the United States.

For the Framers, the survival of the republic depended on a free press that would tell the voters the truth about their elected officials without fear or favor. As Thomas Jefferson succinctly put it, “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” In Jefferson’s era, the press was made up of myriad independent publications that espoused a wide range of editorial viewpoints and competed with one another for readers. Thus, it would have been difficult to limit press freedom without an overt and heavy-handed government crackdown on disfavored publications. The dramatic transformation of the media landscape in our era has, however, made it much easier to censor content. (READ MORE: New Documents Reveal Government Collusion With Facebook)

First, the trend toward consolidation in the media industry has had a profound effect on who controls the media and its content. According to this report in the Motley Fool, as much as 90 percent of U.S. media is owned by the following six companies: Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Paramount, Sony, and Fox. More sinister is the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a global coalition of news organizations, social media and Big Tech firms whose ostensible goal is to tackle harmful disinformation. Its members “alert each other to high risk disinformation so that content can be reviewed promptly by platforms, whilst publishers ensure they don’t unwittingly share dangerous falsehoods.” The list of TNI members will give you the creeps:

The Trusted News Initiative is a partnership, founded by the BBC, that includes organizations from around the globe including; AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post, Kompas – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, NHK – Japan.

During his opening statement to the July 20 meeting of the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. described TNI thus: “TNI is a news censorship cartel.” He went on to describe how it actually operates: “Whenever non-mainstream online news publishers report facts or viewpoints deemed by the TNI to be ‘misinformation,’ TNI members censor, shadow-ban, or deplatform those publishers.” Fox News reports that Kennedy’s organization, Children’s Health Defense, has filed federal lawsuits in Texas as well as Louisiana against various members of TNI alleging that their censorship activities constitute a clear violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

This is not the first time the Antitrust Act has been invoked in response to the excesses of news outlets. In Associated Press v. United States (1945), the Supreme Court ruled against AP pursuant to an agreement it made with its members precluding them from sharing their stories with nonmembers and that existing members had to exclude new ones. The court held that the press had no more right to form trusts than any other business. Inevitably, the First Amendment was raised by AP, but the Court held that it was premised “on the assumption that the widest dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.” Which inevitably brings us back to Jefferson:

I am persuaded that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors, and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers.

This is the difference between the admittedly flawed men who founded our country and the people who yearn to rule us today. All those dead, white males whose statues are routinely torn down by people who have no idea why they possess the very freedom to do so without concern for their life or liberty, whose foibles are routinely recited by people who lack the courage to examine their own failings — believed in their “good sense.” This is far more than can be claimed by the frauds who daily declare themselves willing to “defend democracy” by depriving the public of the truth about our utterly incompetent elected officials and the disastrous results of their ill-conceived policies and even worse execution. (READ MORE: Masking, Vaxing, and Mail-In Ballots)

People like Jefferson understood that some of our elected officials would be corrupt. They knew this has been a fact of political life since the classical era to which they devoted so much study in order to create a system of government that would better serve the people. They believed that a free press combined with a literate electorate had the potential to create a new social compact that elevated individual liberty over the elitist authoritarianism that dominated most of the planet at the time. In the end, it will, but not until we divest ourselves of the crooks and liars who simply want to rule by deception.