A short free press anecdote, that might be apocryphal but I got from a source that is usually impeccable. During the Cold War, a Soviet delegation went to visit the US, to look at the way journalism worked there. Their host took them to a number of American cities.... 1/n

...and visited newspapers, radio stations, magazine publishers and more in each of the cities, including both the major metropolises on East and West coasts, and much smaller cities elsewhere. As the tour went on, the Soviet delegates seemed to get more and more impressed. 2/n

At the end of the tour, when they were about to leave, one of the delegates turned to their US host, and asked him ‘How do you do it?’. The American looked at him, very surprised. ‘How do we do what?’ 3/n

“I mean,” the Soviet delegate said, “We send journalists to Gulags. We pull out fingernails. We make some disappear. We shut down newspapers. And we *still* can’t get the uniformity of thought and loyalty to the regime that you get.”. /ends