In his book on the underground journalists of France during World War II, A.J. Liebling, the master of all those who have understood journalists, quoted French philoospher Jean-Paul Satre about the role of journalists at that time. This is an excerpt from Sartre:

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to takeit in silence.
And by choosing for himself in liberty, he chose the liberty of all. This Republic without institutions, without an army, without police, was something that at each instant every Frenchman had to win and to affirm against Nazism.
.........
No one failed in this duty, and now we are on the threshold of another Republic. May this Republic to be set up in broad daylight preserve the austere virtue of that other Republic of Silence and of Night.