What did Benjamin Franklin say about freedom of the press?

The question strikes close to my heart, for I spent the better part of my life as a printer, and few subjects occupied my pen more persistently. My earliest and most ardent declaration appears in the eighth Silence Dogood paper, written in 1722, where I reprinted from the London Journal this conviction: “Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another”. I was but a young apprentice then, yet I felt the truth of it with full force. Yet freedom of the press, like all liberties, can be corrupted by its own excess. In later life, having watched printers abuse their trade with slander and calumny, I grew considerably more nuanced. In my autobiography I noted that I carefully excluded libeling and personal abuse from my own Pennsylvania Gazette, and I drew a sharp distinction in my essay on the Court of the Press: “if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it”. The liberty I championed was the liberty to discuss public measures and question those in power — not a license to destroy private reputations without evidence or accountability. One without the other is not freedom; it is simply a well-armed mob with a printing press.