from the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true,

and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour,

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I think if he was alive today, what he would find bizarre is having fought for decades and centuries to free periodicals and press from the grip of politics that you would have now journalists and people

in the media voluntarily submitting to become instruments of a political party.

This is your host, Scott Bertram, and that's Dr. Khalil Habib, our first guest on today's

program. Dr. Habib is Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College and recently wrote a piece published at a peer-reviewed journal on Toakville and Free Press and Free Speech.

It's called Persecution and the Art of Freedom, Alexis to Tocqueville on the importance of free press and free speech in democratic society.

For Tokville, Dr. Habib, is freedom of the press simply an extension of free speech?

It absolutely is.

In fact, in democracy in America, his two-volume, massive tone on democracy.

In America, only the freedom of the press gets two chapters devoted to its subject. And

that's because Tocqueville sees anything in print and anything expressed orally as an extension

of a fundamental and natural right that every human being has. He was struck in particular

by the fact that America had such a freedom of the press

because in Europe there were licensing laws that would restrict what you had to say.

In order to get a license, you had to satisfy the censors and say England.

And so he comes to the United States around the time of Andrew Jackson's presidency, and he's

just struck by the freedom that the American press has.

And he thinks it's admirable in spite of some of his misgivings.

Before we dig a bit deeper into Tocqueville's views, at least what I sort of tie this to the state

of media today. People who are

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