Politics & Power Quote by Hugo Black

Black’s sentence lands like a judicial dissent written with a reporter’s spine. The key move is his elevation of the press from mere observer to active constitutional counterweight: “paramount” responsibility, not optional virtue. He’s not praising journalists for keeping citizens informed; he’s assigning them a job with blood on the line.

The phrasing is a trapdoor into history. “Deceiving the people” isn’t abstract corruption, it’s the specific machinery of war-making: secrecy, selective facts, and patriotic theater deployed to manufacture consent. Black’s most cutting subtext is that in a democracy, the public is both sovereign and target. The government can’t “send” anyone anywhere without first winning the narrative at home. That’s why the press must stand at the chokepoint where justification becomes policy.

Then he twists the knife with “distant lands” and the grim poetry of “foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.” The repetition of “foreign” isn’t xenophobia; it’s moral accounting. He forces readers to feel the unnaturalness of dying far from home for reasons that may not survive daylight. “Fevers” alongside “shot and shell” widens the indictment beyond enemy fire to the indifferent logistics of empire: disease, climate, and bureaucracy as co-conspirators.

Context matters: Black wrote in the shadow of 20th-century total war and, later, the Vietnam era’s credibility gap. As a Supreme Court justice (and a First Amendment absolutist), he’s arguing that press freedom is not primarily about protecting speech. It’s about preventing state power from laundering violence through lies.