From the campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

Here's your host, Scott Bertram.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome in to another edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.

On this episode, we'll talk with Mark Levine, about his brand new book,

On Freedom of the Press. Also, Barbara Bushie, chairwoman of art,

and professor of art at Hillsdale, will tell us why the Mona Lisa is so famous.

And Liz Astley-White, a Hillsdale grant and current investigative reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, also on the program today.

First, we're joined now by nationally syndicated radio host, New York Times number one bestseller and author of the brand new book, Un Freedom of the Press.

It's available on May 21st and

pre-orders now. Mark Levine. Mark, thanks for joining us. It's a great honor. Thank you. And the new book,

Unfreedom of the Press. And I had the chance to read it before we talked. It is it is outstanding.

And what I like about it, and you can talk a bit about this before we talked. It is outstanding.

And what I like about it, you can talk a bit about this, of course.

It is not a laundry list of current media failures, which I'm sure you could have rattled off in your sleep.

This is a deeply researched book.

It is historical in nature in many, many places. What do you want readers to understand

having read on freedom of the press?

Well, thank you. And several things. My wife says this book reads like a novel, which is pretty

good for a book about the press. First of all, what's the press? What's the history of the

press? How did it come to be? Why is it important? What's happened to it? I think these are

important questions. You hear modern-day practitioners of journalism, so-called, say that they're protecting freedom of the press, but it might be they're not. They're distorting it. And so I decided, I was no expert on this.

You know what? I want to become somewhat of an expert, and I look at the scholarship and I look at the history.

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