Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World
Two hundred and fifty years ago today, fifty-six men signed their names to an act of journalism.
We don’t usually talk about the Declaration of Independence that way. We’ve buried it under so much marble and ceremony that it’s easy to forget what the document actually is. Read it again sometime.
After the famous opening lines, the bulk of it is something every reader of this newspaper will recognize instantly: an investigative report.
Twenty-seven documented grievances against the most powerful man on earth. Obstruction of justice. Judges made dependent on the will of one man for their offices and their salaries.
Mock trials protecting the powerful from punishment. The deliberate cutting off of the people from the institutions meant to serve them.
Jefferson even wrote the mission statement into the text itself: “let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”
That’s it. That’s the whole job. It was the job in 1776, and it is the job now.
Consider what happened next. Congress didn’t lock the Declaration in a vault. On the night of July 4th, they sent it to a printer, John Dunlap, who worked until dawn setting it in type.
Within days it was in the newspapers; within weeks it was being read aloud on courthouse steps to citizens who couldn’t read it themselves.
The founders understood something we’ve spent 250 years relearning the hard way: an indictment of power is worthless if the public never sees it. Publication wasn’t an afterthought to the American founding. Publication was the founding.
And power has never forgiven the press for it.
I was raised on this history, because my family lived it. In the 1960s, my grandfather, the columnist Tom Hennessy, helped run an alternative weekly in Pittsburgh called the Forum.
The night before it was set to publish a report connecting one of the wealthiest families in America to the financial deterioration of a public university, a county judge stepped in and restrained the paper from printing it.
Prior restraint — the exact abuse the First Amendment was written to forbid, deployed by a court to protect a fortune. My grandfather refused to accept it. Blocking publication, he said plainly, was a denial of the freedom of the press itself.
I founded The Olympic Herald in January believing that fight belonged to history. It took less than three months to be proven wrong.
This spring, this newspaper faced a legal campaign that Judge Wentley of 1960s Pittsburgh would have admired: a demand that we remove more than thirty published investigative articles, backed by a request for coercive fines of up to $2,000 per day until we complied.
Not a claim that the reporting was false — a demand that it simply cease to exist.
In April, a Kitsap County visiting judge denied that effort, and the articles stand. It was a victory for the First Amendment in Washington state.
But understand what it revealed: two and a half centuries after a printer worked through the night in Philadelphia, there are still people in positions of power who believe the solution to uncomfortable facts is to make publishing them ruinously expensive.
They are not wrong to think it can work. It works constantly. It works every time a hedge fund guts a newsroom, every time a billionaire owner spikes an editorial, every time a small publication looks at the cost of defending the truth in court and decides silence is cheaper.
The corporate outlets that once held power to account in this state have been captured, consolidated, or hollowed out. What’s left, in too many counties, is exactly what the powerful prefer: an empty press bench.
The founders made a wager on July 4, 1776—that ordinary citizens, given the facts, could govern themselves.
Every abuse this newspaper has documented, from the courthouse to the capital, flourished in the same conditions: darkness, and the assumption that nobody was watching.
So here is where I stand, on the country’s 250th birthday. The Herald’s reporting is free, and it will stay free. No paywalls, ever.
The Declaration wasn’t paywalled either — it was nailed up in public squares and read aloud to anyone who would listen, because facts that only the comfortable can afford are no defense against tyranny at all.
But free to read has never meant free to produce. The records requests, the hearings, the months of document work, and yes, the lawyers it takes to withstand the legal machinery aimed at this newspaper — all of it exists because readers choose to sustain it.
The signers closed the Declaration by pledging to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. I won’t ask for anything so dramatic.
But if you believe Washington needs at least one newsroom that answers to its citizens and no one else, becoming a paid supporter of the Herald is the most direct way to make that true.
Every contribution keeps the reporting free for your neighbors and keeps this newspaper standing when someone powerful decides it shouldn’t be.
Two hundred fifty years on, the assignment hasn’t changed a word.
Let facts be submitted to a candid world.