The PRESS Is National Security, Too

If the state can find a billion, it can find the will to strengthen the estate that guards it — without buying it.

This government speaks often, and rightly, of national security. But, when it says the words, it sees only one picture: soldiers, police, the men and women in arms, the guns and the barracks that guard our borders and our streets.
That picture is true, but it is only half the frame.

For there is another major arm of national security this Republic keeps forgetting to feed, strengthen or empower. It is the PRESS.

One may inquire: what is the PRESS? The term press originally referred to printed publications like newspapers and magazines, produced using a printing press, and the journalists who worked for them.

Over time, its meaning has expanded to include television, radio, online news websites, blogs, podcasts, and social media platforms that disseminate news.

Moreover, the relationship between the press and national security is complex and multifaceted.
The PRESS plays a crucial role in shaping public perception and informing citizens about national security issues, thereby fostering an informed populace essential for democratic engagement and national resilience.

This why scholars believe that a country that arms half of its security while starving the other is not as safe as it believes.

Consider what a newspaper and an intelligence service actually have in common, for it is more than either likes to admit.

Both exist to gather information about the true condition of the nation—what is happening in the ports, the ministries, the counties, the quiet places where trouble is born.

The difference between them is not the gathering; it is what each does with what it finds.

The security service gathers in order to arrest and to prosecute. The press gathers in order to inform and to warn. Both are early-warning systems for the state. One acts through the handcuff and the court; the other acts through the headline and the public conscience.

And more often than the government would care to admit, it is the reporter, not the agent, who sees the danger first. It was reporting, not an intelligence brief, that dragged the cocaine scandal into the daylight and named the vehicles that escorted it.

It is the press that first smells the corruption draining a ministry, the grievance festering in a forgotten county, the foreign boot planted quietly on a disputed border.

A free press is the smoke alarm of a nation: it does not itself put out the fire, but it wakes the house while there is still time to escape.

That is why it is called the Fourth Estate—because guarding the Republic against the abuse of its own power is a security function no soldier can perform, and no army was ever built to do.

Yet in Liberia, the state funds only the half it can point a gun with. The budgets swell for the uniformed services, as perhaps they must; but the PRESS is left poor— under-equipped, under-trained, under-paid, and, worse, treated not as a partner in the nation’s security but glaringly as its enemy.

Its practitioners are cursed from official podiums, accused without evidence of taking cartel money, threatened in their homes and in their families.

A government that buys boots for its soldiers and hurls insults at its watchmen is running half a security strategy and calling it whole National Security Council or Joint Security Committee with fat budget for “Security Operations”. It is guarding the body of the state while blinding its eyes.

Here this newspaper must speak with care, because we are the press arguing about the press, and honesty, it requires us to name the danger in our own argument.

Let it be made transparently clear here. We are not, in anyway, asking the government to buy us.

A bought press is worse than a weak one, for the moment the state owns the pen, it has destroyed the very security the pen was meant to provide.

Empowerment must never become a leash. We do not seek a subsidy that turns, by slow degrees, into a muzzle.

What we mean by empowering the local PRESS is the building of the conditions in which a free and capable press can live: the physical safety of journalists, guaranteed and enforced; a genuine right of access to public information, honored rather than obstructed; professional training worthy of the responsibility; a media economy healthy enough to sustain independent houses without their going hat in hand to power; and an end, at last, to the official harassment and the insults that teach the public to despise the very institution that protects it.

Strengthen the conditions; pay the adverts not later than ninety days of publication; but never purchase the content. That is the whole of the distinction, and it is everything.

The government has spent this season boasting of a billion dollars raised—a real milestone, loudly celebrated. It found the money to throw the party.

Let it now find the will to invest in the information estate as seriously, as it invests in the barracks: not as charity to editors, but as national-security infrastructure, as sound an expenditure as any rifle. Train the reporters. Protect them. Open the records they are entitled to see. Silence the officials who answer questions with slurs. Treat the press as the security asset it has always been, and the Republic will be the safer for it.

For a nation is not made secure by guns alone. It is made secure by a people who know the truth in time to act upon it — and delivering that truth, in time, is the press’s standing gift to the state.


The government that would guard its citizens must also guard, and strengthen, the estate that quietly guards them all. Anything less is a fortress with the windows painted over: heavily armed, and utterly blind.