“The present state,” the editors wrote, “seemed to require some extraordinary effort in the cause of freedom.” The writers linked what they described as the sorry state of the world to the deteriorated state of the press. 

Among the problems requiring the editors’ effort were runaway taxing and spending, creating a drag on the economy. The “weight of taxation” and “an obstinate adherence” on the part of government officials to “the same profligate waste of the national resources … precludes all hope of returning prosperity,” the editors wrote.

The quotes are from a “To Our Readers” message on the front page of the October 20, 1822, issue of the Sunday Times of London. They were republished over the weekend for the 200th anniversary edition of that storied newspaper.

The editors of the Sunday Times two centuries ago saw an opening “for a firm, stanch, and resolute assertion of public freedom.” They “resolved to exert ourselves to answer that call, and to execute to the best of our zeal and talents, a task more requisite to the liberation and happiness of mankind, than any other.”

The message is striking for being as applicable today as it was two centuries ago. Beyond that, what’s lovely is the understanding that asserting the freedom necessary for the “liberation and happiness of mankind” is the responsibility of the newspaper.

The editors aren’t waiting on the sidelines wishing to be rescued by some brave politician. They understand that it is their own job to lead the way. An  illustration elsewhere in Sunday’s Times makes the same point. 

The anniversary illustration does not feature a collection of Times reporters chasing the news. Nor does it portray the editors serving as dutiful stenographers to powerful newsmakers. Rather, it pictures a crowd of caricatures of British prime ministers all gathered together reading the paper. 

The image was a reminder of the ups and downs of that cause of freedom over the past two centuries, and of the important role that Britain has played. There is Winston Churchill, whose courage and determination helped to defeat Hitler in World War II. 

There is Margaret Thatcher, who helped to rebuild the British economy from the socialist slump by transforming it in the direction of freer markets. There is Boris Johnson, the champion of Brexit, who helped to liberate the United Kingdom from the oppression of Brussels-based European Union bureaucrats.

Newspapers surely deserve some of the credit for the considerable expansion of freedom over the past 200 years — from Frederick Douglass’s North Star in the fight against slavery, to the role of the Wall Street Journal editorial page under Robert L. Bartley in winning the Cold War.

And to the journalistic work of Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky that paved the way for a Jewish state in the land of Israel, to Milton Friedman’s 121 Wall Street Journal opinion pieces and 300 columns in Newsweek that helped make the case for economic freedom.

The corollary to that, however, is that when freedom has been in retreat worldwide over the past decade or more — as the watchdog group Freedom House reckons it has been — then part of the blame belongs, also, to a press that has lost its credibility. Some press outlets have sold out, chasing declining revenues or idolizing partisan political figures instead of breathing the spirit of freedom.

If the current conditions are to improve, it will, today too, require “extraordinary effort in the cause of freedom” from a range of news organizations — 200-year-old ones, younger publications, and new ones yet to be founded.

The technology has changed, but two centuries later, the “liberation and happiness” of humankind depends as surely as it ever has on “a firm, stanch, and resolute assertion of public freedom.”