TRIGGERnometry
The Best Conversation About News, Opinion and Censorship You've Ever Heard - Richard Miniter
21 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What historical perspectives on news and censorship are discussed?
They have two conflicting ideas of news, which emerge from two different parts of our history. News sort of starts to begin in ancient Rome. They were trying to control rumors. And as bad as we think the internet is, ancient Rome was far worse. In the 1400s, along the River Rhine, is this idea that free speech is necessary for social peace. The Dutch ideas of the Rhine River tolerance come here.
The upper class of New York is terrified. They fear the accountability of the opinions of people.
Chapter 2: How did ancient Rome influence modern journalism?
And what we're seeing playing out with all of these battles on X and on YouTube is these two different ideas are in a death match. Depending on which side wins depends on how we will see reality in the coming decades.
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Richard Minniter, welcome back to Trigonometry. Well, it's great to be back, guys. Well, it is great to have you back because the last episode we did with you, the first episode we did with you, was on our last US trip. I think it was one of the biggest interviews we've done, actually, in the history of the channel. Absolutely crushed it. Fantastic conversation about American history.
Today, we wanted to talk to you about the history of news, history of journalism, the history of censorship, and there's a lot to talk about going all the way back.
There is a lot to talk about, and... A lot of what people when people fight about news, which they do on the Internet every moment of every day, it's because they have two conflicting ideas of news which emerge from two different parts of our history.
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Chapter 3: What role did the Rhine River play in the evolution of free speech?
And once you understand the history of news, you'll understand why both sides feel so intensely about their point of view.
And what are those two sides?
Well, let's do the history first. Yeah. OK, so as all good histories, let's start with caves and cave drawings. Right. And the Early humans told stories on the walls of caves. And we think, due to certain DNA evidence, about 100,000 years ago, started telling oral stories.
But I would contend while they were passing on new information, they were passing on speculation, emotional reactions to things. They might even have been telling recent history. This is how the hunt went or this happened in the village over the hill. That wasn't news. That was information, speculation, rumor.
Just a little aside, also I think scientists misunderstand these cave drawings, these wonderful animals, some of which are extinct and we have no evidence of other than the drawing on the wall of Lascaux in France or various different Spanish caves. But during the ice age, you're spending a lot of days indoors.
If I go to any, in the wintertime in the northern hemisphere, any person's home that has children, and I go into the child's room, what's on the walls? Animals, pictures of animals, right? So isn't it possible that they weren't necessarily leaving a record for us, which they had no idea about?
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Chapter 4: How did the invention of the printing press change news dissemination?
but to entertain their children during the long Ice Age. So entertainment is older than news. We knew that already. So this goes on for a while. City-states form, and governments began issuing decrees. They make announcements from palace walls, and we have records of these from the Sumerians and the Babylonians and cities of Ur and Lagash.
And some of these records are very old, 40,000, 35,000 BC. But again, that's not news. That is the people in charge telling you what they're doing, and maybe not even why, or what your orders are. News sort of starts to begin, proto-news emerges, I contend, in ancient Rome with the Acta Diurna, which you can translate as the daily acts or the public acts.
And this isn't yet news, but it's very close, because it is presented to the general public. We don't have any copies of these. These have all vanished. We know the Act of Diana exists only because of quotations from various Roman writers who do have copies of their work. But we do know that these were put up fresh every day for about a 200-year period, starting in BC and ending
depending on what sources you see, 180 or 220 AD. And they announce far-off victories or defeats, sometimes other news, gossip that would make the Daily Mail blush, senators, mistresses caught in embarrassing situations. But these are put up in the forum and in other public places, and then sometimes read aloud to the illiterate. kind of like town criers that you'd see much later in history.
So it has the mix that we would recognize, right? It has gossip, it has politics, it has a bit of economics, it has foreign affairs, but it's controlled by the government. And it is not really accountable publicly. The audience doesn't have a say. And only senators and tribunes, and tribunes, the Romans were ruled by a two-house Congress or Parliament, right? The senators and the tribunes.
So the famous abbreviation you see everywhere, SPQR, is the Senate and the people of Rome, while the people is represented in the House of the Tribunes. Anyway, a tribune, an elected official, or a senator, another elected official, largely inherited as well, they could object. That was it. And there was no correction process, you couldn't sue, there was no libel, there was no slander.
But it's the beginning of news. Now, why do the Romans do it? No other ancient people had really done it this way before. And it's because they were trying to control rumors and speculation. And as bad as we think the internet is, ancient Rome was far worse. People making up all sorts of wild stories. People thinking the conspiracy theories of the internet Ancient Rome had this times 10.
And they realized if we didn't do something, if we didn't start to say what the actual casualty figures were in the battle that we lost, or what the actual territory we just took was, wild stories would abound. And that would mean that there would be trials, sometimes executions, coups, upheavals, all sorts of things. So if we could give the public, and this is why it's proto-news,
common share of facts things that we all know are true and can roughly agree on that that would cause peace not perfect peace not perfect harmony but at least we're not arguing about basic facts And that is the beginning of understanding the importance of news.
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Chapter 5: What impact did the Zenger trial have on freedom of the press?
If we all have the same vocabulary of facts, then we're debating about how important this is compared to that. Why is our politics so polarized today? Because we no longer have this shared diet of facts. But when it works, and we're all agreed as to what is going on, what the facts are, and the debate is about the emphasis, we're in a much less polarized world.
that's why the romans created the act that they are that's what they were trying to do now news really begins and maybe francis this differs entirely from what pbs told you and so i apologize um about in the 1400s along the river rhine now the rhine is a very special river in european history
It begins in the mountains of Switzerland, it goes through Germany, and then it empties into the North Sea in modern-day Netherlands, Holland. And along this river, we see a tremendous amount of Protestant movements emerges. Germany at this time period is not a united country, even though technically it's the Holy Roman Empire. There's different princes and principalities and dukes and so on.
And your royal leader, your princely leader, could decide what flavor of Protestant you were or whether you're still with the Roman Catholic Church. And you would be on a boat going down the Rhine, and you would be, if you were a Protestant, you'd look out on Catholic cities, and you know that if you came to shore, the chances of you being tried and burnt alive as a heretic were very high.
And yet, on the river, 10 feet from shore, in the current, you were safe. And your cargo was safe, for the most part. And that's not to say that all Protestants were united either. Protestants executed Protestants. These religious wars were intense. But just as the Gutenberg in the city of Mainz, that's sort of on the east bank or the left side of the, looking from above, of the Rhine River,
Almost in the dead middle of the German Rhine is Mainz. And in that city, not far from the docks, is this guy, Gutenberg, with the movable type printing presses. There are others who have similar devices, maybe not as good as his. And he's printing the Bible, and he makes so much money printing the Bible in the vernacular, he can afford to take speculation in printing other things.
So he prints catalogs, he prints books, opinions, he prints religious tracts, including for denominations that he doesn't share the values of, with the idea that even if it's banned in Mainz, he can bundle it down to the docks, put it on a boat, and the city that's paying for it further down the Rhine will take the cargo and he'll make the cash.
So as long as he's not caught with it, everything's fine. So why does all this matter? Well, it is competition of ideas. And remember, in medieval times, all political ideas are really offshoots of religious ideas. And the core Protestant idea at this time is that you have a personal relationship with God. You discover who he is.
in your personal journey and you have, to use a horrible modern phrase, your truth. And no one, and by the way, that's where that idea comes from. And no one should be able, in the Protestant perspective, no one should be able to interfere in your exploration. And part of your exploration is talking about it and thinking about it and reading about it.
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Chapter 6: How did journalism evolve during the Progressive Era?
There are no hereditary employees. It's governed by contract. And you have a right to sell to your customers as they, if they choose you and you choose them, that's it. That's all that matters. So this idea of this personal relationship with God has enormous political and economic effects.
and at the mouth of the rhine in the modern day netherlands becomes an incredibly tolerant society especially after the spanish leave in the at the end of the 1500s and this this idea of tolerance becomes super important but what is moving up and down isn't just books people don't want books are expensive and people don't have time for books all the time but the beginnings of
what are originally called in German news books, but just what's going on in these different cities of the Rhine. And by the way, has the religion of this city changed since you last sailed past and is now unsafe for you to land? Or do we want to mock these people in Geneva or in Strasbourg or what have you? And so these newspapers are quite lively. They caricature people.
They make sexual and spiritual allegations. It's as wild as anything on the internet today. And you combine this idea of free speech and capitalism and you get the beginning of news where you have news outlets that are only accountable to the people who pay for them.
If you start writing about things that people don't trust, don't believe, your audience goes down, and soon your printing costs are higher than your revenue, and you're out of business. If, on the other hand, you feed your audience, you give them what they want, and hopefully give them a healthy version of what they want, your revenues will grow. More people will buy your paper.
And this is the beginning of news. Independent of the state, lively in its perspectives, accountable to its readers and this idea evolves and changes over time it comes to England in Europe almost last but it it definitely flowers in the early 1600s in the in the Netherlands and in Germany and the Dutch settle and form a colony that they call New Amsterdam which is the modern city of New York
The Dutch ideas of the Rhine River tolerance come here. And New York has been a decidedly wide open free market of ideas, opinions, and businesses for centuries as a result of the Dutch foundations of the city. And by the way, Canal Street in downtown literally was a canal until they filled it in. I mean, the Dutch...
Deep foundations of our culture are hidden, but still visible, especially things like, what is news? And in the 1730s, there's a German immigrant from the Rhineland named John Peter Zenger. And after apprenticing for a printer in Philadelphia, he moves to New York with his wife and opens a small newspaper called the New York Journal. And he begins publishing the news of the day.
And he publishes an account, which he says is true, of the royal governor of New York. Remember, the Brits still rule in the 1730s, still rule New York. And about corruption, self-dealing, failure to look after the public, his public duties. What he has to say about the governor is less important than what happens next.
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Chapter 7: What effects did technology have on the future of news?
So his wife would put out the newspaper because that's how they made the money to pay for the food and pay the rent.
and they keep trying to shut down her newspaper and she works and she would go to jail every night and provide the food to her husband and he would say okay go over to new jersey take this rowboat over and you know all these little machinations to stay in business right much later the new york journal is merged
into a newspaper that you may have heard of called the New York Post after many changes of ownership and splits in ownership. Anyway, so copies of this paper exist to this day. You can find facsimiles online. He finally goes to trial, and some slick lawyers from Pennsylvania argue for the first time in the English common law that truth is a defense against libel. Yes, we do not argue truth.
that these things, these facts that we presented, make the governor open to ridicule. He looks ridiculous. He looks corrupt. But this is the truth. And truth, I should not be punished for producing the truth. This is a revolutionary doctrine. And because this is a British Empire case, this precedent will change the English-speaking world.
This German immigrant who's been in the United States, the colonies, really, for less than a decade is about to change the english-speaking world but the governor and the upper class of new york which is a piece of the upper class of england is terrified how will we stop ridicule that will come from the lower classes how will we stop the finger pointing Dare they? Our honor comes from status.
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,
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Chapter 8: How do censorship and misinformation intersect in today's media landscape?
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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
entire broadsheet, some cases 52 inches wide, with pages upon pages, all available for a penny in the US. And they are so profitable, they're employing people to translate news from overseas. And this is where the word correspondent comes from. So in this time period, traveling was a very big deal. Most people did not travel far.
Now, today we have jet planes and 19-year-old illiterates Instagramming from Bali, right? It's a different world. But in 1791, chances that you could travel more than a dozen miles, two dozen miles, to this day, I think, to join the Travelers Club in London, in Pall Mall. you have to say that you've traveled 400 miles from the founding stone of the club.
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