单选题 In the shifting relationship between the press and the presidency over nearly two centuries, there has remained one primary constant--the dissatisfaction of one with the other. No president has escaped press criticism, and no president has considered himself fairly treated. The record of every administration has been the same, beginning with mutual protestations of goodwill, ending with recriminations and mistrust.
This is the best proof we could have that the American concept of a free press in a free society is a viable idea, whatever defects the media may have. While the Founding Fathers and their constituencies did not always agree on the role the press should play, there was a basic consensus that the newspaper (the only medium of consequence at the time) should be the buffer state between the rulers and the ruled. The press could be expected to behave like a watchdog, and government at every level, dependent for its existence on the opinions of those it governed, could expect to resent being watched and having its shortcomings, real or imaginary, exposed to the public view.
Reduced to such simple terms, the relationship of the presidents to the press since George Washington"s first term is understandable only as an underlying principle. But this basic concept has been increasingly complicated by the changing nature of the presidency, by the individual nature of presidents, by the rise of other media, especially television, and by the growing complexity of beliefs about the function of both press and government.
In surveying nearly two centuries of this relationship, it is wise to keep in mind an axiom of professional historians—that we should be careful not to view the past in terms of our own times, and make judgments accordingly. Certain parallels often become obvious, to be sure, but to assert what an individual president should or should not have done, by present standards, is to violate historical context. Historians occasionally castigate each other for this failing, and in the case of press and government, the danger becomes particularly great because the words them selves— "press" and "government," even "presidency"—have changed in meaning so much during the past two hundred years.
Recent scholarship, for example, has emphasized that colonial Americans believed in a free press, but not at all in the sense that we understand it today. Basic to their belief was the understanding, which had prevailed since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, that whosever controlled the printing press was in the best position to control the minds of men. The press was seen at once as an unprecedented instrument of power, and the struggle to control it began almost as soon as the Gutenberg (or Mazarin) Bible appeared at Mainz in 1456, an event which meant that, for tile first time, books could be reproduced exactly and, more important, that they could be printed in quantity.
Two primary centers of social and political power—the state and the church—stood to benefit most from the invention of the printing press. In the beginning it was mutually advantageous for them to work together, consequently it was no accident that the first printing press on the North American continent was set up in Mexico City in 1539 by Fray Juan Zumarrage, first Catholic bishop of that country. It gave the church an unprecedented means of advancing conversion, along with the possibility of consolidating and extending its power, thus providing Catholic Spain with the same territorial advantages that would soon be extended elsewhere in the Americas.
When British colonies were established in North America during the early part of the seventeenth century, it was once again a religious faith, this time Protestant, that brought the first printing press to what is now the United States. But while colonial printing in Central and south America remained the province of the Catholics for some time and was used primarily for religious purposes, in North America secular publishing became an adjunct of a church-dominated press almost at once and was soon dominant.
It is part of American mythology that the nation was "cradled in liberty" and that the colonists, seeking religious freedom, immediately established a free society, but the facts are quite different. The danger of an uncontrolled press to those in power was well expressed by Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, when he wrote home to his superiors in 1671: "I thank God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government, God keep us from both." There are those in twentieth-century America who would say "Amen" to Berkeley"s view of printing and "libels against the best government."

单选题 According to the passage, all American presidents have experienced ______.

单选题 Conflict between the president and the press indicates that ______.

单选题 The passage implies that before the invention of the printing press ______.

单选题 In contrast to printing in South America, printing in North America ______.

单选题 The passage suggests that issues of a free press ______.