A Monopoly on Truth Is the Dearest Monopoly of All

The scene is almost comically transparent. Several major news organisations report unfavourably upon the conduct of the executive; shortly thereafter, their journalists find their credentials revoked “without notice or process” and are physically excluded from the grounds by the guards. At the same moment, the palace—for so in effect it acts—announces a new spectacle, ‘Trump TV’, to be broadcast from the official residence itself. The regular press pool, whose function is to relay common footage to many outlets, withdraws in protest; other excluded outlets seek redress in the courts. The quarrel is thus framed as a private squabble between proud journalists and a prickly ruler. It is nothing of the sort.

In every question of policy, one ought first to ask who pays. In trade, the benefits of monopoly appear in the splendid profits of a favoured company, while the costs are thinly spread across innumerable consumers who pay a farthing more for their sugar or their timber. So here. The visible advantage of excluding disfavoured reporters belongs to the incumbent, who enjoys a quieter day and a more flattering picture on his own channel. The invisible tax falls upon the public, especially those with least leisure and education, who depend upon independent eyes and ears to tell them what their governors are doing.

When I wrote of merchants and manufacturers in the *Wealth of Nations*, I observed that they are never so dangerous as when they persuade the magistrate to grant them an exclusive privilege and so narrow the competition that keeps them honest. The case of information is precisely analogous. There is here a producer—the government’s own communications office—and there are rival producers, the various news outlets. To revoke the rivals’ access, and then to offer a government-controlled ‘Trump TV’ as the principal source, is to create, if not a perfect monopoly, then at least a heavily protected firm. It is a merchant’s petition translated into the realm of truth.

Defenders will protest that no one has a “divine right” to a seat in the briefing room; that rulers are not obliged to endure hostile interrogatories; that the public may still seek out other sources. All this has a surface plausibility. Yet the impartial spectator, that imagined but well-informed onlooker of whom I wrote in *The Theory of Moral Sentiments*, will ask a simpler question: is access being arranged to best serve the people’s knowledge, or to shield the ruler’s interest? When exclusion follows hard upon unwelcome reporting, when the stated objection is to “fake news” rather than to any breach of order, the pattern of motives is not difficult to discern.

Nor ought we to flatter ourselves that mere exhortations to virtue will suffice. Self-love, when confined within the rules of justice, is a powerful principle of order; but where the rules themselves are left at the discretion of those who gain by bending them, we ask for uncommon self-command. The temptation for any ruler to suppress critics, to prefer friendly interviewers, to substitute his own pageant for others’ scrutiny, is as constant as human vanity. A wise constitution, like a wise commercial policy, does not rely on angels administering it. It diminishes opportunity for abuse by making access regular, predictable, and not contingent upon the complaisance of the reporter.

Some will say that this contest is a luxury of the educated, that artisans and labourers care more for wages than for which correspondent stands by the colonnade. Yet, as I laboured to show in the *Wealth of Nations*, the true measure of prosperity is what the annual produce of the land and labour affords to the labouring poor. That produce is not only bread and beer; it includes the information by which citizens judge wars, taxes, and regulations that determine their future earnings. To darken that information, to allow only such rays of truth as pass through the coloured glass of ‘Trump TV’, is to reduce the real wage of citizenship while leaving the money wage untouched.

There is, finally, a deeper point. Free communication about the conduct of rulers is not an ornament of opulence, to be enjoyed when times are calm and put aside when inconvenient. It is part of the administration of justice itself. To revoke access “without notice or process”, to reward praise and punish criticism, is to judge in one’s own cause and to corrupt that great invisible hand by which countless independent observers, each seeking their own reputation, nevertheless guide public opinion toward something like the truth. A government that covets a monopoly on truth soon discovers that such a monopoly can be maintained only by a monopoly on force.