But as a newspaper publisher, Franklin was no crusader. The early American press was financially fragile, dependent on a small reader and commercial base. “Printers” — as publishers were called, since most of them combined editorial duties with the grueling, dirty and literally stinking job of working the hand press (the sheepskin balls used to ink the type were soaked in urine and wrung out by hand) — could not afford to offend too many of their customers and advertisers. So Franklin, the apostle of sound business practices, relied on his sly wit and hid behind fictitious bylines to make his points.

Still, Franklin was often, in his words, “censured and condemned by different Persons for printing things which they say ought not to be printed.” On May 27, 1731, in response to his critics, the young newspaperman published his famous Gazette editorial, “Apology for Printers,” — which, observes Walter Isaacson in his excellent biography, “remains one of the best and most forceful defenses of a free press.” The press Franklin championed in his wry and incisive essay was not a passionate partisan, but one that was open to a variety of clashing viewpoints, which might or might not reflect those of the publisher. Publishing was a trade, just like shoemaking or carpentry, Franklin pointed out — but the stuff of printing was not boots or benches, it was “mens’ opinions,” which “are almost as various as their Faces.” And “if all Printers were determined not to print any thing till they were sure it would offend no body, there would be very little printed.”

Franklin illustrated this point in typically humorous fashion with the fable of a man and his son, who were traveling to market with a donkey. Criticized by one passerby for riding the ass while his son was forced to walk, the man invited his boy to join him on top of the animal, only to be tongue-lashed by a second passerby for overburdening the poor beast. The man promptly dismounted, but the next passerby sharply scolded the son as a “graceless, rascally young Jackanapes” for letting his “aged Father … trudge along on foot.” When the lad then joined his father on the ground, both were ridiculed by yet another traveler “as a Couple senseless Blockheads” for plodding through the dirt when they could be riding. Finally, unable to bear the criticism, the father turned to his son and suggested they “throw the Ass over the next Bridge, and be no farther troubled by him.”

But, vowed Franklin, he would not throw his ass — or printing press — off the bridge. “I shall continue my business. I shall not burn my press and melt my letters.”

The duty of the printer, wrote Franklin, was not to avoid controversy, but to make sure that both sides of an issue found a home in his publication. In a famous sentence that, as Isaacson remarks, “summed up the Enlightenment position (on free speech)” and “is now framed on newsroom walls,” Franklin wrote: “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”

On a less lofty plane, Franklin also defended the printing of salacious dish, using the same argument still employed by tabloid publishers everywhere: Don’t blame us, blame the readers — it’s what they want. “If (printers) sometimes print vicious or silly things not worth reading, it may not be because they approve of such things themselves, but because the People are so viciously and corruptly educated that good things are not encouraged.” When given a choice between a trashy read and “an excellent Version” of “David’s Psalms,” Franklin wryly observed, it’s no surprise what flies off the shelves.

In a later issue of the Gazette, Franklin would offer a more provocative defense of gossip: It cuts the rich and powerful down to size. “It is frequently the means of preventing powerful, politic, ill-designing men from growing too popular. All-examining Censure, with her hundred eyes and her thousand tongues, soon discovers and as speedily divulges in all quarters every least crime or foible that is part of their true character. This clips the wings of their ambition,” Franklin wrote.

But the truth, as Isaacson notes, is that while Franklin “toyed in the Gazette with the argument for gossip,” he actually did not wallow much in it, held back by “the other part of his personality [that] was more earnest: he continually resolved to speak ill of nobody.” Still, the man destined to become a revered Founding Father was certainly not above printing juicy stories, including one that ran the week after “Apology for Printers” about a man who, finding his wife in bed with a gentleman named “Stonecutter,” lunged at his competitor with a knife, eliciting some bemused wordplay from Franklin about castration.

As a shrewd businessman as well as a man of the people, Franklin knew the secret of publishing a successful newspaper — give readers a compelling mix of the high and low. It’s a knack that has been largely forgotten by progressive publishers today, who labor under the peculiar conviction that readers can be sustained by a dry diet of indignant rhetoric and moral instruction alone.

Franklin retired from the arduous printing profession in 1748 at the age of 42 (the precise midpoint of his life) to devote himself to politics, science and diplomacy. He was able to hang up his printer’s apron, less because of his newspaper’s success than that of his enormously profitable self-help franchise, “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” which sold a staggering (for the time) 10,000 copies a year. But Franklin would pass the newspapering bug on to his favorite grandson, Benny Bache, who by finally rejecting his grandfather’s admonition to shun partisanship, would create the most influential — and controversial — publication of post-Revolutionary America, the Aurora.

Despite its brevity, the life of Benjamin Franklin Bache has cinematic sweep. Taken by his famous grandfather at the age of 7 on Franklin’s historic mission to France in 1776 (during which he would save the Revolution by rallying France to America’s cause and then negotiate the peace treaty with Britain), the boy would not return to his family home in Philadelphia for nine years. Educated in elite French and Swiss schools, and blessed by Voltaire himself soon before the philosophe’s death (he laid his wrinkled hands on the lad’s head and pronounced, “God and Liberty,” in English), Bache was then entrusted by Franklin to France’s master printer, François Didot, to be taught how to cast type.

Franklin, who died in 1790 at age 84 in his Philadelphia home, after calling Benny to his deathbed and holding his hand, bequeathed his printing equipment to his 21-year-old grandson. As the favored heir of an American monument, Benny Bache was embraced by Philadelphia high society and regarded as one of its most eligible young men. As a prominent gentleman, he was encouraged by his well-placed friends to use his grandfather’s press to take up the respectable calling of book publishing. But Bache had newspaper ink in his blood. Soon after Franklin’s death, he launched a Philadelphia newspaper that Bache at first, with high commercial hopes, called the General Advertiser and then four years later the Aurora General Advertiser — and finally, when his dreams of business success had been supplanted by more crusading ambitions, simply the Aurora.

“At first, Bache stuck close to policies his grandfather had laid down in the ‘Apology for Printers,’ promising in the inaugural issue that his paper would be impartial,” writes historian Jeffrey L. Pasley in “The Tyranny of Printers,” a fascinating, richly detailed account of how the free press grew from the bitter battles in early America between the rising class of editor-printers and the Federalist governing elites. But soon, bored by this studiously inoffensive style of journalism and alarmed by the monarchist tendencies of George Washington’s presidency — which he viewed as a betrayal of the democratic principles that his grandfather and fellow American revolutionaries had fought for — Bache was leading his paper to the ramparts in the struggle with Federalist power.

As Pasley writes, “Bache’s partisanship was a costly act of conviction that required great courage … The young editor had grave reservations about joining fully in the partisan battle that was emerging. It would have been much more comfortable to lead the sheltered life of an apolitical or conservative Philadelphia aristocrat, but Bache hoped to resist that temptation. ‘When [the political line] comes to be struck definitely,’ he wrote, ‘I hope I shall be found on the right side of it.’”

Because of his own impeccable revolutionary heritage, Bache was not awed by the country’s first president, whom he viewed as a military fraud and a would-be king. By the end of Washington’s term in 1797, Bache was piling heaps of steaming abuse on the nation’s patriarch in the Aurora, sending him off on his final day in office with a call for “rejoicing” in the land over the end to “political iniquity” and “legalize[d] corruption.”

This growing scorn for America’s leadership — which only increased during the presidency of Washington’s successor, John Adams — proved too much for Bache’s old friends in the Philadelphia gentry, who turned on him with a vengeance, snubbing him and his wife on the high-society circuit and boycotting the Aurora. As advertisers abandoned the paper, Bache’s losses mounted — during his eight years as publisher, the Aurora would lose almost $20,000. But Bache and his wife and publishing partner, Margaret, the daughter of a St. Croix sugar planter, persevered, exchanging their blue-blood friends for a “political underworld of journeyman printers, newspaper writers, and street- and tavern-level activists,” in Pasley’s words, and turning their home and newspaper office, which were housed in the same Market Street building, into a headquarters for radical republicanism.

After Adams’ election, Federalist animosity toward Bache grew into persecution. In the spring of 1797, he was physically attacked and badly injured by a young Federalist while touring a ship at the Philadelphia waterfront. The Adams administration awarded Bache’s assailant with a diplomatic appointment to France. The following year, while Bache was away, a drunken Federalist mob surrounded his home and terrorized his wife and children before being driven off by neighbors. The attacks prompted the publisher to wonder whether it “might, indeed, be a gratification to some that I should have my throat cut.”

Murder might not have been on the minds of Bache’s enemies, but certainly imprisonment was. The following year, the Federalists in Congress pushed through the notorious Sedition Act — a bill, commented Thomas Jefferson, that was aimed directly at his republican ally, Benjamin Franklin Bache. On June 26, 1798, Bache was arrested by a federal marshal and charged with “libeling the President & the Executive Government.” Slapped with a crushing bail of $4,000, Bache was forced to appeal to his friends for help and the Aurora and his family teetered on the brink of ruin.

Adding insult to his financial and legal woes, Bache was then subjected to a relentless barrage of personal attacks by an anti-republican smear artist named William Cobbett. Combining Matt Drudge’s contempt for the truth with the defamatory glee of Rush Limbaugh, Cobbett riddled Bache with poison arrows in his aptly named paper, Porcupine’s Gazette, calling him a printer “notoriously in the pay of France” and “the prostitute son of oil and lamp-black” who should be dealt with like “a TURK, A JEW, A JACOBIN, OR A DOG” and demanding the suppression of the Aurora.

At the lowest depths of his life — even his parents had disowned him because of his journalistic crusades — Bache turned to freedom-loving Americans and urged them to save the Aurora by subscribing to it. They did. Alarmed by the Sedition Act, hundreds of new readers signed up for Aurora subscriptions (at the relatively hefty annual price of $8). As Pasley notes, Bache was even more surprised to find many of the paper’s deadbeat subscribers — a widespread problem in the early newspaper industry — suddenly paying their overdue bills, with a few actually sending in advance payments for the next year. The beleaguered Bache was practically reduced to tears by the outpouring of support. He wrote with gratitude that “the calumnies of the enemies of liberty in this country have not deprived the editor of the good opinion of a great portion of his fellow citizens.” Bache vowed that he would not let down his supporters and that he would carry on his fight, undeterred by “the malice of little men dazzled by the glare of power.”

On Friday, Sept. 7, 1798, just days after writing this, Bache fell ill, a victim of the yellow fever epidemic sweeping through Philadelphia. The Baches’ former high-society friends had fled to the countryside, but the newspaperman and his wife could no longer afford this means of escape. “At any rate,” observes Pasley, “the editor was determined to remain zealously at his post.” By Monday, Bache was dead. He was 29.

The Aurora did not die with its founder. A grieving Margaret Bache vowed to keep it alive and she did, with the help of its new editor, William Duane, an Irish-American firebrand whom Bache had named his successor on his deathbed. Duane, who later married Margaret, would make the Aurora shine even brighter, taking it to a new level of national prominence and using its power to help found the Democratic Party. In 1800, Jefferson would credit the Aurora and like-minded papers with winning him the presidency, praising them for sparking a “revolution … on the public mind, which arrested the rapid march of our government toward monarchy.”

Ben Franklin would likely not have wished such a turbulent life on the grandson he so adored. Franklin himself had a way of navigating through the political storms in his life with humor and finesse, and he never risked his prosperity on journalistic crusades. Franklin was ingenious at crafting an editorial mix that relied heavily on entertainment, not just political and moral ruminations, and at launching profitable spinoff businesses like “Poor Richard’s.” But times change, and sometimes civic-minded journalists find themselves in more fiery circumstances, as did Benjamin Bache, who decided he could not follow his grandfather’s advice and remain impartial as the new governing elite that emerged from the Revolution prepared to install themselves as an American monarchy.

And perhaps in this regard, he followed his grandfather’s path after all. For Franklin, as Isaacson points out, was the most democratic of the Founding Fathers, more egalitarian than even Jefferson. The son of a soap- and candle-maker, a man who began his own career as an ink-stained wretch, Franklin truly believed in the rights and virtues of the common man. It was these common men and women, these lovers of freedom, who befriended Benjamin and Margaret Bache when they were driven out of Philadelphia’s aristocracy. And it was they — these believers in the sanctity of the constitutional principle of free speech, a liberty paid for with American blood — who rallied around Bache and his paper in their darkest hour and kept the Aurora shining.

“Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”: defiant words scratched on parchment by men making a bold break from their past. But they were just words until courageous journalists like Benjamin Franklin Bache hammered them into bright, unbending metal in the fires of political battle.

The evening will be hosted by Salon founder and CEO David Talbot and will feature a panel discussion, including Dan Siegel, longtime Berkeley activist and former advisor to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan; Rebecca Solnit, author and expert on social movements; Terence Hallinan, former supervisor and district attorney of San Francisco; Matt Haney, executive director of the University of California Student Association; and Melanie Cervantes, activist-artist and co-founder of Dignidad Rebelde.

The evening will also feature stunning images captured at Bay Area occupations and Occupy Wall Street by photographers Mark Murmmann, Mia Nakano, Brian Nguyen, Robyn Twomey, Rafael Roy and Gretchen Robinette.

Admission is free, but seats are limited, and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, with preference given to Salon Core members and their guests. Salon Core members can reserve seats for themselves and one guest by logging in and RSVP’ing here: https://sub.salon.com/premium.

All across America, the Occupy Wall Street movement has galvanized the long-abused American people. Now the movement is going beyond simply protesting the financial industry’s massive theft. People are taking concrete steps to reverse the historic shift of wealth to the 1 percent. Organizations like MoveOn deserve credit for kickstarting Bank Transfer Day, by declaring that “it’s time to make Wall Street pay in our communities,” and calling for a big day of protests outside local branches of Wall Street banks.

This is a good start. Now we need to extend the Bank Transfer idea, disinvesting not only from oppressive financial institutions, but from corporate politics and corporate media. American democracy has become thoroughly corrupted by the flood of corporate dollars and influence. Propelled by the obscene Supreme Court ruling on corporate campaign financing, spending during the 2012 campaign year will likely double over 2010 expenditures, skyrocketing to nearly $8 billion. The Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the 1 percent. And the Democrats are close behind, with President Obama charging close to $40,000 a plate on the campaign dinner trail. Real campaign finance reform is impossible, with corporate-controlled politicians in both parties blocking any substantive legislative efforts to clean up the system.

The 99 percent need to counter this deep corruption by withdrawing their campaign dollars from bought-and-paid-for politicians, and channeling these donations to new leaders who pledge to support the new declarations of independence that are now being put forward by the movement. We have seen the power of digital democracy and grass-roots fundraising. A full quarter of Obama’s campaign contributions in 2008 came from small donors. We’re the 99 percent. We need to harness our collective power. We can use this financial clout to punish candidates who are working against our interests, and to reward those who are fighting for us. When a political leader like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo spits in the faces of the working people, students and Democratic activists who mobilized to elect him by opposing extension of the state’s millionaires’ tax — and has the utter gall to declare it a principled decision — we need to defund him. Our hard-earned money should go instead to those elected officials who regard the 99 percent as their constituency, not the Kochs and Trumps.

Those who want deep change in America also need to support the media organizations that are speaking truth to power and fairly covering the new social movements. Fox News is not the only media mouthpiece that has declared war on OWS. As Salon contributor Gary Kamiya recently pointed out, the daily newspaper in liberal San Francisco, of all places, has also been pounding out a relentless drumbeat of criticism against the Occupy movement. The San Francisco Chronicle has called for the mayors of San Francisco and Oakland to unleash the police against protesters, and when they wisely did not comply, the newspaper’s editorial page prayed for rain to wash out the tenacious encampments in those cities. The Hearst-owned Chronicle has no appreciation for the way real democracy functions. Democracy in the streets can be rough and dirty sometimes. But at long last it’s real. The mainstream media prefers the smooth-oiled machine of corporate-funded bipartisanship. But the times demand rougher strife. The 99 percent are not in a position to fly their congressional representatives to lobbyist-funded junkets in the Bahamas, so we must rely on a scruffier form of free speech to get Washington’s attention.

And now for the shameless self-promotion. Instead of subscribing to newspapers like the Chronicle that are dedicated to snuffing out this exciting experiment in democracy, citizens who want real change should consider subscribing to media like Salon — which demonstrated where its heart was recently by hooking up the OWS site in San Francisco to the Internet. Or donating to web sites like AlterNet, which did the same for OWS in New York. Or contributing to nonprofit online dailies like the Bay Citizen, if you’re looking for a wide and balanced spectrum of OWS coverage in the San Francisco area.

As Salon staff writer Andrew Leonard observed, we are witnessing the birth of an alternative America, with our own new financing mechanisms. We must also find ways to support a thriving independent media, because the fight for a new America will not just be won in the streets or in legislative halls — it will happen in the media clouds, where the battle for hearts and minds clangs loudly every day.

You can make sure that the voices of real democracy are heard. If you appreciate the powerful commentary of Glenn Greenwald and the street reporting of Justin Elliott and the many other columnists, reporters and editors who work hard to bring you Salon each day, then put your money where your heart is. Please join Salon Core today.

Now, six years after leaving Salon, I’ve decided to return as CEO, because I think the country needs a fighting, independent media more than ever.

Americans are deeply worried and dispirited. Three years ago, as the country slid into a bottomless recession, we rallied around a presidential candidate who promised real change, only to see him fall captive to the same forces of greed and endless war that have brought us to ruin. The alternatives presented by the Republican Party would only accelerate this national decline. We’re faced on the one side by a well-meaning but ineffectual leader who has waited far too late in his presidency to rally the people around the powerful themes of jobs and economic justice — and on the other side by GOP leaders who are competing to see how quickly they can dismantle the last decent vestiges of public life in America.

We can no longer wait for the country’s corporate-dominated political system to solve our problems. All of us know friends and family members who are in dire straits; many of us are barely clinging on, struggling to pay the bills and raise our children, while trying to give them a sense of hope for the future. The richest get even richer, the rest of us get poorer. The gap between the powerful and the powerless in America grows wider than ever.

In these increasingly hard times, Salon is dedicating itself to an American revival. Our editorial mission will become more explicitly and aggressively populist. We will be publishing more investigative pieces, exposing the shadow dance of power. And both Democratic and Republican targets will be fair game, since both parties are increasingly under the control of the same corporate forces.

Americans are in desperate need of a true crusader for their interests — not a phony Tea Party. Salon will fight tooth and claw for the beleaguered majority, exposing the machinations of oligarchy with rigorously reported, deep journalism.

For just two examples of this renewed Salon commitment to essential, original journalism, please see Mark Hertsgaard’s “Hellfire!” — on Rick Perry’s faith-based reaction to the inferno that is sweeping his state – and Brad Friedman’s “The $10.50 Voting Machine Hack” – on the frightening security gaps that could corrupt our electoral process.

Salon’s coverage will not be all gloom and doom. We will cover the people who are rebuilding America from the ground up — taking over their local schools, creating community gardens and food barter networks, launching green start-ups.

We’re inspired by Robert Kennedy, who — after failing to convince President Johnson to end the war in Vietnam — came back to his Senate office in a mood of dark despair about the fate of America. “Oh, to hell with it,” RFK told his young staff, with a new fire in his voice. “Let’s start our own country.”

It’s time to start our own country.

Last week I visited the young people who were camped out near the New York Stock Exchange, in protest against Wall Street’s reign of greed. They told me they had little to look forward to in today’s America. No jobs, a crushing load of student debt, and a political system that seems completely rigged against people like themselves. But they had not given up hope. Inspired by the social upheavals in the Arab world and the protests in Europe against rapacious financial elites, these young Americans are calling for their own “American Spring.”

Salon wholeheartedly embraces this process of national renewal. In coming months, we plan to hold a series of American Spring public events in cities near you, to discuss the future of our country. Our goal is nothing less than changing the conversation in America, which is now stuck in endless replay mode between cautious Democrats and zealous Republicans. There is nothing for us in the droning presidential debates and pre-packaged political chatter on TV. Real life is elsewhere. By changing the channel, Salon hopes to finally begin moving the country forward.

We can’t do this without you. To accomplish our mission, we need you to join our revived membership program. We know that the Salon community is the core of our strength. That’s why we will soon be relaunching our membership program as Salon Core.

In coming days, we will announce a compelling package of benefits for our new Salon Core members — as well as our loyal Salon Premium members. You can show your support right now by signing up here to get more information about Salon Core as soon as it’s available.

With your support, Salon will expand its hard-hitting coverage. We will also introduce new creative dimensions like Salon Studio, featuring original video portraits of life in America that you can’t see anywhere else. And next week, Salon E-Books will publish its first offering, the hilarious “A Tea People’s History,” by our own Alex Pareene. By the end of the year, Salon will look and feel like a much more dynamic creature, with a new burst of enterprising journalism as well as an exciting schedule of video and music programs — all offered on the Web and on various mobile platforms.

I look forward to working with you in the weeks and months to come. I know that together we can make a difference.