Above all, he drew a sharp line between truth and falsity in reporting the news. Admitting that no one has a right to lie in print any more than in speech, he successfully inserted into the minds of the jurors the notion that an editor should be allowed to plead the authenticity of a story as his justification for publishing it. He got them to agree that the word “false” should be operative and indispensable in the kind of seditious libel of which Peter Zenger stood accused.
Even Hamilton could not see how titanic an issue was joined. He was primarily interested in the problem at hand—to get his client acquitted—but the fact is that in speaking for his own time he was speaking for all time. He would have been a prophet as well as a philosopher if he had seen fully the parting of the ways at which he stood, with the old censorship extending backward into the past, and the new freedom pointing toward the future. It was merit enough that he saw farther than any other man of his period, and that he stated the argument for the emerging principle better than anyone else.
The full import of his victory in court is not yet exhausted, and very likely never will be. As time passes we understand more exactly just how great a blow it would have been if Governor Cosby had been able to kill the magnificent pioneering experiment in independent journalism that the Journal was. We appreciate better than our ancestors the overwhelming significance of the trial of Peter Zenger, that for the first time an American practitioner of unfettered news coverage had won a complete and avowed vindication through the orderly official process of a trial by jury.
Ever since, newsmen have looked back on the Zenger case as the origin of their most primordial right. If that right was not promptly conquered everywhere in the Colonies, Peter Zenger had lit the train for a whole series of delayed reactions. The trial touched off discussions about the meaning of libel, showed that existing definitions were defective rather than axiomatic, compelled the authorities to take more account of public opinion before launching lawsuits against their opponents of politics and journalism, and thereby saved other editors and printers from following the old path that led nowhere except to prison.
James Alexander’s Brief Narrative of the Case and Tryal of John Peter Zenger was widely reprinted after Zenger himself had turned out the first edition, and the text became a classical precedent to which anyone faced with censorship could point. Americans still point to it when freedom of the press is under discussion.
Present-day newsmen have a more professional reason for being grateful to this Colonial printer. Throughout his imprisonment and trial he maintained a steadfast silence about the identity of the men who wrote the contents of the newspaper that he ran through his press; and he thereby gave an enormous impetus to the thesis that a journalist has a right to keep secret the sources of his information. Other printers before Zenger had refused to divulge the names of their contributors, and some achieved the crown of the semimartyr in consequence, but none had ever been given the unanswerable backing of the courts.
Always the formal conditions of Zenger’s acquittal must be borne in mind, for his triumph was not just a personal thing, or the wresting of a momentary privilege from an indolent or interested official. It was a legal precedent.
The Zenger case necessarily reflected on American politics. The acquittal of the Defendant involved the condemnation of the Plaintiff, which meant that Governor Cosby’s administration was found guilty of the things with which the Journal charged it. One more stumbling block was thrown in the path of tyranny, one more support removed from dishonesty in high places.
Cosby had hand-picked his judge to insure control of the court, but never would this kind of illegality be repeated with the same lighthearted contempt for criticism. Never again would any Colonial governor try quite so recklessly and arrogantly to rig elections or to seize land or to play the politician with his Council in order to create within it a faction that would rubber-stamp his whims. These misdemeanors had been condemned (by implication) in a cold legal decision—and the Colonies would not forget.
The behavior of courts handling libel cases changed. When the New York jury came in with a verdict of “Not guilty,” it did something that was rather startling for the 1730’s. According to the traditional theory of law, the business of jurors was to determine the fact of publication, and to leave the verdict to the court. In this case, the jury should have confined itself to deciding by whom the Journal had been printed and at whom the contents were aimed, after which its function would have been fulfilled. The setup was ideal for Governor Cosby since he had his henchman on the bench, Chief Justice James Delancey, all prepared to render a verdict of “Guilty” as soon as the jury had agreed on the undeniable (and undenied) fact that Peter Zenger was actually printer of the newspaper.