TO THE EDITOR:
It is most nettlesome to continue to encounter indications, implications and intimations that North Carolina state government, including the three Research Triangle universities, would participate in any way in any kind of government-controlled journalism arrangements or operations.
John F. Kennedy, who himself was an accomplished writer of books and magazine articles prior to his election to the presidency in 1960, believed that a vigorous and independent free press not only is important to the upholding of the principles of our U.S. and state constitutions, but moreover that a free press can be a boon to better government for all Americans — in that certain problems in the operations of government may sometimes only be brought to light through the give and take of healthy press-government relations.
You just cannot count on the government, no matter how benevolent it may be in outlook or how noble its goals and objective may be at any one time in history, to be the proper domain of editorial direction of a free press in this country.
Let us hope that neither N.C. State University, Duke University nor the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or for that matter any other member institutions of the greater UNC system, would permit themselves to get talked into special “information-sharing” agreements, which would curtail freedom of press, religion and expression in North Carolina as guaranteed under the Bill of Rights of (the) U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Rights of the North Carolina Constitution.
The Research Triangle Park was established to attract new commercial enterprises, scientific technologies and intellectual initiatives to North Carolina, not to impose harsh limits on traditional, tried-and-true constitutional legacies in this state and country.
To err may be human, but to censor can often be injurious to the proper functioning of the three branches of government at both the federal and state levels.
David McKnight
Durham
