"serve the governed, not the governors."

I saw the movie, The Post, and highly recommend it. This Steven Spielberg film, starring Meryl Streep (Kathryn Graham) and Tom Hanks (Ben Bradlee), is a fascinating tale of the right of the people to know what its government has done. Graham and Bradlee put their careers on the line and faced possible prison time.

In 1971, The New York Times and The Washington Post were publishing the Pentagon Papers, a massive cover-up of government secrets that spanned three decades and four U.S. Presidents. The study, commissioned by the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, conducted by the Department of Defense, covered thirty years of history about how we got involved and what we had done in Vietnam. The study was classified Top Secret. Daniel Ellsberg worked on the study and ultimately leaked it to the newspapers.

The Nixon administration citing national security sought and got injunctions in lower courts against publication. The U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision ruled otherwise. 

Justice Hugo Black, often regarded as a leading defender of First Amendment rights such as the freedom of speech and of the press, refused to accept the doctrine that the freedom of speech could be curtailed on national security grounds. Thus, in New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), he voted to allow newspapers to publish the Pentagon Papers despite the Nixon Administration's contention that publication would have security implications. In his concurring opinion, Black stated,

In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. [...] The word 'security' is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment.

— New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713, 717 (1971).