ONE of our greatest tragedies is that we cannot know the information that is denied to us. We call the antidote to this "epiphanies" – moments of clarity and realisation of deep truths. My media epiphany was reading Power and Responsibility, a textbook by Professor James Curran. It’s a powerful story I’ve since retold whenever the opportunity arises. Since this is my last column in The National, at least for a while, I feel incumbent to share it with you now.

There was once a proud and powerful radical press. Its newspapers, born in the age of French and American revolutions, capitalised on the swift transformations of technology and an expansion of the potential reach of information. There was Twopenny Trash, Weekly Police Gazette, Northern Star, Reynolds News, Lloyds Weekly to name a few. They pushed – in a age of deep inequality and exploitation – for democracy and workers rights, and reached two million readers by 1836.

Paid for by subscription – an older equivalent of modern "crowdfunding" – the papers were the vanguard of the hopes of working people, and a belief that through political struggle life could be made better.

But their fragile liberty could not survive. As Curran explains, the radical press – representing those without wealth or property – faced a persist assault from their political opponents. The property owners, who controlled parliament, police and the corporate press, feared that democratic access to information would encourage revolution and the sharing of the wealth.

So one of the most brutal and systematic crackdowns was targeting at the radical press. Editors were placed on trial for "sedition". There were 167 sedition prosecutions between 1815 and 1823 alone. Governments imposed "stamp duty" on the radicals to try and force them out of business – it was increased by 266 per cent. When they didn’t comply, the repression intensified. Paperboys and distributers of the radical newspapers were jailed. There were 1,130 such prosecutions in London alone from 1830 to 1836.

The crackdowns, combined with the growth of advertising models, meant that by the early 20th century most of the radical papers had folded. The media was now dominated by the giant press barons. And the ownership and control of the printed press has not changed a great deal since.

More recent innovations, like this newspaper and new online media, are in many ways a reincarnation of that old, radical press tradition. It’s vital given we have not inherited a system of a free press with open ideas. The free, radical press we could have had was strangled at birth.

Editors of the Edinburgh Gazette were found guilty of "sedition" in 1793 and 1794 due to their support for Scotland first democracy movement, The Friends of the People. First editor Captain Johnston and publisher Simon Drummond were tried and found guilty. Alexander Scott, who took on the paper, had a similar fate. He fled and was declared an outlaw.

The legal and political pressures remain today. Last week Scottish Green MSP Andy Wightman published details of a legal threat against him – with an astronomical claim of £750,000 in damages. The case has not proceeded to a court summons, but is in itself a chilling example of how legal threats can attempt to place pressure on an elected representative.

Jonathan Mitchell QC, a senior Scottish legal expert across four decades, described it as “the use of threats of litigation to shut up responsible journalism”. Scottish PEN, which campaigns for rights to expression, added that “free expression in Scotland is done a dangerous disservice by the out-dated and inadequate defamation laws.”

These pressures are even more pervasive in cash-strapped media institutions, eager to avoid the risk of financial settlements or high legal costs. The lesson of survival can too often be to not rock the boat too much. Why risk naming the powerful culprits, the overly litigious, the liars, if that brings the heavy weight of legal and editorial barriers? With blurred defamation laws, journalism is stifled and diluted at source: in the writer’s own mind, before it is potentially diluted again and again.

The interview between Professor Noam Chomsky and a youthful Andrew Marr examines these ideas. Chomsky speaks of journalists whose relationship with the media is that “they try to play it like a violin. If they see a little opening they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t usually make it through.”

“How can you know I am self-censoring?”, defends Marr, to which Chomsky responds: “What I’m saying is if if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."

The referendum was characterised by a hope of creating a new media. Some changes have taken place. But all such liberty and progress remains fragile. Thank you to those who have published, read, and responded to my weekly column. And best wishes to all at The National in their work to live up to the best traditions of the radical press.