Francis Foster

And our status comes from not being ridiculous.

And when Quakers from Pennsylvania tell us that we're going to be made ridiculous, what to do?

And their answer is, don't do ridiculous things.

That's not satisfactory.

We are.

We are important people.

They fear the accountability of the opinions of people who are far poorer, far less educated, in some cases literally dirtier than themselves, right?

But it's the beginning of a revolution because the jury nullifies.

The jury refuses

to find him guilty, even though the facts say that he is, and then he admits that he is, more or less, at trial.

So this becomes a principle, that truth is a defense against libel.

Much later in English history, you're going to have some unfortunate laws, and so you can't, if you're trying to operate a newspaper in England today, I would not use the Zenger precedent.

But in U.S.

law, it is absolutely still governance.

Truth is an absolute defense in this country against libel.

And that case could only have happened in New York, which really settled as New Amsterdam with the Dutch sense and the Quaker sense of, which comes from the Pennsylvanians who argued this in court.

And this defense means that you cannot be ruined by the powerful for reporting things about them, which means that suddenly journalists can hold corporations, aristocrats, the famous,

accountable in a way they never could before.

Then the next piece of the revolution happens.

when you start to apply the factory model of production to news what could what instead of having to hand print out on something a little bit better than what gutenberg offered 300 years before just 50 60 years after zenger you have these massive printing presses which become ever more efficient at the end of the 18th century deep into the 19th century where it's suddenly by the 1830s you have the penny press