The public is deprived of quality information, and has been since the Declaration of Independence.
Add that to the fact that the public has no reasonable way to conduct discourse upon the information to refine their opinions, and therein is the reason the ideals the framers established or the democracy designed to support them does not serve the American people. In fact, the misleading is so huge that democracy is a disservice to those people.
This has been true since just after the Bill of a Rights. Thomas Jefferson was outraged by what the press was doing.
"I deplore... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them... These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our funtionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief... This has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit." --Thomas Jefferson to Walter Jones, 1814. ME 14:46
"Our printers raven on the agonies of their victims, as wolves do on the blood of the lamb." --Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1811. ME 13:59
"From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice." --Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1816. ME 14:430
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:224
"As for what is not true, you will always find abundance in the newspapers." --Thomas Jefferson to Barnabas Bidwell, 1806. ME 11:118
"Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to Nathaniel Macon, 1819. ME 15:179
"The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807.
Sowing Dissension
"A coalition of sentiments is not for the interest of printers. They, like the clergy, live by the zeal they can kindle and the schisms they can create. It is contest of opinion in politics as well as religion which makes us take great interest in them and bestow our money liberally on those who furnish aliment to our appetite... So the printers can never leave us in a state of perfect rest and union of opinion. They would be no longer useful and would have to go to the plough." --Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1801. ME 10:254
"These people [i.e., the printers] think they have a right to everything, however secret or sacred." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1815. ME 14:345
"To divide those by lying tales whom truths cannot divide, is the hackneyed policy of the gossips of every society." --Thomas Jefferson to George Clinton, 1803. ME 10:440
"[We] have seen too much... of the conduct of the press in countries where it is free, to consider the gazettes as evidence of the sentiments of any part of the government; [we] have seen them bestow on the government itself, in all its parts, its full share of inculpation." --Thomas Jefferson to George Hammond, 1792. ME 8:300
"Nations, like individuals, wish to enjoy a fair reputation. It is therefore desirable for us that the slanders on our country, disseminated by hired or prejudiced travellers, should be corrected." --Thomas Jefferson to James Ogilvie, 1811. ME 13:69
"Our newspapers, for the most part, present only the caricatures of disaffected minds. Indeed, the abuses of the freedom of the press here have been carried to a length never before known or borne by any civilized nation." --Thomas Jefferson to M. Pictet, 1803. ME 10:357
"For the present, lying and scribbling must be free to those mean enough to deal in them, and in the dark." --Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Randolph, 1792. ME 8:411
Effects on the Nation
"Our people, merely for want of intelligence which they may rely on, are become lethargic and insensible of the state they are in." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1777. ME 4:288, Papers 2:19
"The materials now bearing on the public mind will infallibly restore it to its republican soundness... if the knowledge of facts can only be disseminated among the people." --Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 1799. ME 10:104
"I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time, whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them... but no details can be relied on." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:224
"History may distort truth, and will distort it for a time, by the superior efforts at justification of those who are conscious of needing it most." --Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson, 1823. ME 15:442
"A truth now and then projecting into the ocean of newspaper lies serves like headlands to correct our course. Indeed, my scepticism as to everything I see in a newspaper makes me indifferent whether I ever see one." --Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1815. ME 14:226
"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:225
"We... who are retired from the business of the world are glad to catch a glimpse of truth here and there as we can, to guide our path through the boundless field of fable in which we are bewildered by public prints, and even by those calling themselves histories. A word of truth to us is like the drop of water supplicated from the tip of Lazarus' finger. It is as an observation of latitude and longitude to the mariner long enveloped in clouds, for correcting the ship's way." --Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams, 1817. ME 15:145
"I may say from intimate knowledge, that we should have lost the services of the greatest character of our country (i.e., George Washington) had he been assailed with the degree of abandoned licentiousness now practised... He would have thrown up the helm in a burst of indignation." --Thomas Jefferson to James Sullivan, 1805. ME 11:73
"The public... say so from all quarters... that they wish to hear reason instead of disgusting blackguardism." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1799. ME 10:98
"The firmness with which the people have withstood the... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them." --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1804.
"The printers and the public are very different personages. The former may lead the latter a little out of their track while the deviation is insensible; but the moment they usurp their direction and that of their government, they will be reduced to their true places." --Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1811. ME 13:59
"I would wish you to distribute [some pamphlets], not to sound men who have no occasion for them, but to such as have been misled, are candid and will be open to the conviction of truth, and are of influence among their neighbors. It is the sick who need medicine, and not the well." --Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 1799. ME 10:104
Dealing With the Press
"During the course of [my] administration [as President], and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety; they might, indeed, have been corrected by the wholesome punishments reserved and provided by the laws of the several States against falsehood and defamation; but public duties more urgent press on the time of public servants, and the offenders have therefore been left to find their punishment in the public indignation." --Thomas Jefferson: 2nd Inaugural Address, 1805. ME 3:380
"The Chief Magistrate cannot enter the arena of the newspapers." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1811. ME 13:64
"I have been for some time used as the property of the newspapers, a fair mark for every man's dirt." --Thomas Jefferson to Peregrine Fitzhugh, 1798. ME 10:1
"I have from the beginning determined to submit myself as the subject on whom may be proved the impotency of a free press in a country like ours against those who conduct themselves honestly and enter into no intrigue. I admit at the same time that restraining the press to truth, as the present laws do, is the only way of making it useful. But I have thought necessary first to prove it can never be dangerous." --Thomas Jefferson to William Short, 1808.
"I had laid it down as a law to myself to take no notice of the thousand calumnies issued against me, but to trust my character to my own conduct and the good sense and candor of my fellow citizens." --Thomas Jefferson to Wilson Nicholas, 1809. ME 12:288
"The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies." --Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, 1816.
"I feel no falsehood and fear no truth." --Thomas Jefferson to Isaac Hillard, 1810.
"[One printer's] malignity, like that of the rest of his tribe of brother printers who deal out calumnies for federal readers, gives me no pain. When a printer cooks up a falsehood, it is as easy to put it into the mouth of a [great man] as of a smaller man, and safer in that of a dead than a living one." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1811.
"From a very early period of my life, I had laid it down as a rule of conduct, never to write a word for the public papers." --Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1796. ME 9:340
"I never in my life had, directly or indirectly, written one sentence for a newspaper; which is an absolute truth." --Thomas Jefferson: The Anas, 1800. ME 1:435
"At a very early period of my life, I determined never to put a sentence into any newspaper. I have religiously adhered to the resolution through my life, and have great reason to be contented with it. Were I to undertake to answer the calumnies of the newspapers, it would be more than all my own time and that of twenty aids could effect. For while I should be answering one, twenty new ones would be invented. I have thought it better to trust to the justice of my countrymen, that they would judge me by what they see of my conduct on the stage where they have placed me, and what they knew of me before the epoch since which a particular party has supposed it might answer some view of theirs to vilify me in the public eye. Some, I know, will not reflect how apocryphal is the testimony of enemies so palpably betraying the views with which they give it. But this is an injury to which duty requires every one to submit whom the public think proper to call into its councils." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Smith, 1798. ME 10:58
"[I have seen] repeated instances of the publication of what has not been intended for the public eye, and the malignity with which political enemies torture every sentence from me into meanings imagined by their own wickedness only... Not fearing these political bull-dogs, I yet avoid putting myself in the way of being baited by them, and do not wish to volunteer away that portion of tranquillity, which a firm execution of my duties will permit me to enjoy." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:226
"Conscious that there was not a truth on earth which I feared should be known, I have lent myself willingly as the subject of a great experiment, which was to prove that an administration, conducting itself with integrity and common understanding, cannot be battered down even by the falsehoods of a licentious press, and consequently still less by the press as restrained within the legal and wholesome limits of truth. This experiment was wanting for the world to demonstrate the falsehood of the pretext that freedom of the press is incompatible with orderly government. I have never, therefore, even contradicted the thousands of calumnies so industriously propagated against myself. But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength by recalling it within the pale of truth. Within that, it is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and of civil liberty." --Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Seymour, 1807. ME 11:155
Reforming the Press
"My opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful [is]... 'by restraining it to true facts and sound principle only.' Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:224
"Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2nd, Probabilities. 3rd, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The second would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The third and fourth should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:225
"An editor [should] set his face against the demoralizing practice of feeding the public mind habitually on slander and the depravity of taste which this nauseous aliment induces. Defamation is becoming a necessary of life, insomuch that a dish of tea in the morning or evening cannot be digested without this stimulant. Even those who do not believe these abominations, still read them with complaisance to their auditors, and instead of the abhorrence and indignation which should fill a virtuous mind, betray a secret pleasure in the possibility that some may believe them, though they do not themselves. It seems to escape them, that it is not he who prints, but he who pays for printing a slander, who is its real author." --Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:225
