Democracy in America

Tocqueville argues that popular sovereignty and press freedom are intimately linked:

The sovereignty of the people and freedom of the press are therefore two entirely correlative things: censorship and universal suffrage are, on the contrary, two things that contradict each other and cannot be found in the political institutions of the same people for long (174).

Americans accept press freedom because criticisms of the law are permissible. More fundamentally, they reject the idea that any court could be objective enough to criticize a newspaper and control it.

Though press freedom is entrenched, Tocqueville argues that the press is “weak” because the country as a whole is “rarely troubled by profound passions” (175). He notes that newspapers contain many more advertisements in the United States than French newspapers do. More significantly, it is very easy to found a newspaper in America, so they proliferate in all parts of the country and are not centralized. Consequently, “[n]ewspapers in the United States […] cannot establish great currents of opinion that sweep away or overflow the most powerful dikes” (175). Unlike French journalists, American ones work “without art” and do not engage deep political matters (177). But in the end, newspapers still act as forces for party politics and unite disparate groups; “through it they speak to each other without seeing each other and understand each other without being put in contact” (178).