It wasn’t meant to be this way. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington understood that one of government’s primary roles is to ensure that all people have access to news and information. And this duty didn’t begin and end with their ratification of the First Amendment. The founding fathers used other strategies — including subsidizing postal rates for printed media and laying the foundation for public libraries — to guarantee that, in the words of Madison, people could “arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”