America is “indebted” to the free press for its work reporting on the Vietnam War, Watergate, and sexual crimes committed by priests and other men in power, Senate candidate Mitt Romney wrote in an essay released Thursday.
“The free press dispelled the false conspiracies about the 9/11 attacks, President Obama’s birth, and Joe McCarthy’s lurking communists,” Romney wrote. “The work of a free press is essential.”
The former Massachusetts governor and two-time presidential candidate describes in the essay how media consumption has changed in his lifetime — from a reliance on daily newspapers, national publications and a limited number of television networks during his youth in Detroit to the modern proliferation of curated online content that reinforces biases and in some cases contains propaganda from campaigns, political parties, or foreign adversaries.