In preparing the item below for the blog and the op-ed page of The Wichita Eagle, I wanted to use the familiar quotation: “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”
I wasn’t sure who said it, but when the first Google item I clicked on said H.L. Mencken, I thought, “of course, Mencken,” and went on my merry way.
This morning I got this message from Rhonda Holman, one of the editors on the page:
In your commentary, you wrote: “In pre-television days, the renowned American cynic, H.L. Mencken, said, ‘Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.’”
A bit of Internet searching indicates this is often misattributed to
Mencken and should be attributed to A.J. Liebling.
I called Rhonda and promised to get to the bottom of this. I looked at Google again and found 80,200 items attributed the quote to Mencken and 23,700 to Liebling.
I was shaken enough by the disparity to call the Reference Desk at the Wichita State University Library. There I got help from Angela Paul, who confirmed Rhonda’s catch of my mistake, using The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations.
So, thanks Rhonda, thanks Angela.
I sure hope it was Liebling!
