My Secret Crush!

You know the old parlor game, “If you could invite "X" number of people, living or deceased, to a dinner party, who would you ask?” My list changes every time I'm reminded of the game, but one name pretty much always stays put: Benjamin Franklin. This guy was the total package: intelligent, humorous, sensual, resourceful, honest, charming, wise, bawdy, worldly, inventive, sensible, observant, diplomatic, and on and on and on. I’m not sure I’d want to invite anyone else to this dinner party if Ben were going to be there…I’d much rather have him all to myself. Okay, enough about my secret crush on a guy who's been dead for over 200 years...

As a printer by trade, the founder of America's first lending library, a voracious reader, and a strong proponent of intellectual dialogue, Benjamin Franklin had a lot to say about freedom of the press. I could attempt to sum up his thoughts on that topic, but I couldn't say it better than he did himself in his “Apology for Printers,” an editorial for his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette. It’s a pretty forceful argument for freedom of the press, and also for that of speech and thought.

(My only quibble with Franklin would be on his point #10 in the above, in which he says that he himself would refuse to print anything “that might countenance vice, or promote immorality.” As any reader of Franklin knows, the man understood that sex sells, and he wasn't above going that route from time to time in order to push his newspapers...sometimes stepping well over the morality line of the time.)