Every year of my journalistic career of nearly half a century, I have known only a free and independent press in the United States. My professional start was in the 1970s. Those were years when Americans could see clearly how the press served democracy: With the publication of the Pentagon Papers, first by The New York Times, the American public learned of the failures its government had covered up during a long war in Vietnam that cost so many lives. And then there was Watergate, an